‘Don’t worry, I hate him too.’ He bundles me down the stairs, past an astonished Nicky and Frances. Growth, roused by the commotion and assuming Rad is being attacked, launches himself at me, barking and snapping. He catches the hem of my dress in his teeth and swings there, legs whirling. The backs of my calves are being lacerated by his claws.
Mr Radley calls in a half-hearted tone, ‘Oh do calm down, Rad,’ which doesn’t help. Nicky and Frances still haven’t moved: they’ve never seen Rad in a rage before. Neither have I. I’m so shocked and humiliated, and so frightened of further savagery from Growth, that it’s almost a relief a second later to find myself out on the doorstep, alone. Pulling the dog away from my dress with a rending sound, Rad’s last words are ‘Just fuck off and don’t ever come back here’, before he slams the door on me.
I haven’t got anything with me, my purse, shoes, nothing, but I’m not about to tap on the door and ask for them. I walk all the way home on hot, gritty pavements. Other pedestrians give me a very wide berth indeed: I must look like an escaped lunatic. My dress is torn, I’m barefoot, my legs look as if they’ve been beaten with brambles and my face is awash with tears and snot. I pray that there will be no one in, but mother is out in the front garden with a soap spray, on aphid patrol.
‘Abigail, what’s the matter? Where are your shoes?’ she says, betraying her priorities. I’ve just mastered my tears but the sound of concern in her voice sets me off again. I can’t tell her what has happened. It will confirm all her long-simmering prejudices about the Radleys: that they are unreliable, probably unhinged, definitely not respectable. She will be scathing about Lexi’s desertion. After all, she and my father have separated over a moral problem, not because they want to increase their chances of happiness. Even at this extremity I feel bound to defend the Radleys – to be loyal to my image of them.
Mother abandons the aphids and steers me indoors. ‘What’s happened?’
‘R-r-rad doesn’t like me any more,’ I say, pathetically, through my sobs. I must have used just the same words about my old friend and enemy Sandra when I was nine.
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know. He doesn’t want to see me ever again.’ We sit on the stairs and she puts her arm around me. For a moment or two I feel comforted, but then reality crowds back again.
‘Oh darling, I’m so sorry.’ She is desperate to tell me I’m better off without him, that she’s never liked his holey jumpers and his long hair and long words, but she restrains herself. And besides, she has another worry. She goes slightly pink and bites her lip before saying, very fast, ‘Abigail, I know you won’t have, but did you sleep with him?’ I shake my head and she almost collapses with relief. ‘Oh, thank God for that.’ For mother this seems to make it all right. I haven’t been used and cast off – just cast off, which is nothing. To me, though, not having slept with him is not the consolation it was meant to be. Now I wish I had. I wish I was pregnant. Anything to preserve the connection.
‘He’ll probably have changed his mind by tomorrow,’ she says. Having satisfied herself that we haven’t Done It she is prepared to concede that much. ‘You know what a temperamental lot they all are.’ She can’t resist this little dig.
‘What’s the row?’ My grandmother has been woken by our voices. I give mother a beseeching look and bound up the stairs to my room to avoid Granny’s inquisitorial welcome.
She’s right, I tell myself. In a minute he will phone and apologise. Mr Radley will have explained, exonerating me entirely. Rad will be feeling overpowered by remorse and guilt. I convince myself so thoroughly of all this that soon I am planning what line I am going to take when he rings. Magnanimous: we’ll just forget it ever happened. A little aggrieved perhaps, or even deeply wounded. I may refer to my scourged legs. As the evening wears on, minute by minute, and the phone remains silent the response I have been rehearsing becomes more and more conciliatory. I begin to doubt that the phone is working, but when I pick it up the dialling tone is there, mocking me. As I replace the receiver it occurs to me that Rad may have chosen that very second to ring, and hearing nothing but the engaged signal will have given up or changed his mind. Oh please, please make him ring me, I plead to the God that Rad doesn’t believe in. What can they be doing there? They can’t surely have gone out for that meal, tonight of all nights, with Lexi gone and me exiled and suffering. Perhaps he was beginning to hate me anyway and was just waiting for an opportunity to throw me off. I pace my room, anxiously trying to calculate what time they would be likely to return from the restaurant. I compute the length of time it will take them to drive, park, order, eat, pay and drive again. As the appointed moment approaches and passes, time, which has dragged all evening, begins to gallop, and it is midnight and all hope is extinguished.
Mother comes up and brings me a cup of hot chocolate – I have refused supper – and persuades me to go to bed. Her patience with Rad is wearing thin: if she gets to him before I do she is quite likely to tell him what she thinks of him. Her loyalty to me is touching, but burdensome all the same. I am exhausted with crying anyway, as if all my energy has leaked out in the salt water. I’m like a spent battery. My night’s sleep comprises a series of pleasant dreams from which I wake with a momentary sensation of deliverance, which gives way to crushing disappointment as I remember.
In the morning I find on the doorstep a cardboard box containing my shoes, purse, and the rest of the clothes I’d been keeping in Frances’ wardrobe. Rad must have brought them over in the middle of the night to avoid seeing me. I scrabble through the contents frantically, hoping to find a note, a line of his writing, something, but there’s nothing of course. He hasn’t even written my name on the box. The clothes have been neatly folded. I can’t decide if this is a good or a bad sign, but a sign it surely is. I see portents everywhere: the blue sky means hope; the single magpie, disaster. If I get back upstairs before mother calls me he’ll phone; if I don’t, he won’t. She asks me if I want any breakfast when I’m still half-way up and I almost bite her head off.
At nine o’clock I cave in and dial the Radleys’ number. It’s the only one apart from my own that I know by heart. I can hardly hold the receiver still, my palms are so sweaty. I haven’t planned what I’m going to say and by the time the phone has rung ten times my mouth has dried up anyway. I pray it won’t be Mr Radley who picks up the phone. I don’t feel equal to confronting him yet. Eventually there is a click and a terse ‘Yes?’ from Rad, and I manage no more than a ‘Hello’ before he cuts me off. I ring straight back. My dignity has been fatally compromised by now, and I am too distraught to care about anything but getting a hearing. There is no reply.
‘I’m going round there,’ I tell mother. She looks alarmed at this: she is still suspicious about the provenance of the scratches on my legs, and, besides, has thoroughly embraced the idea that I am the injured party and should therefore await the apology that is due to me. Her vote for passivity having been rejected, she recommends that I powder my nose, as if this might be the clincher. Looking in the mirror I can see her point, but my attempts at restoration are doomed. My skin is so taut and shiny from crying that the powder glides straight off, and applying mascara to wet lashes leaves a crescent of smudged lines and blobs beneath my eyes like so many exclamation marks.
I am not going to turn up empty-handed. As revenge for the anonymous parcel on the doorstep I will return the copy of Goodbye to All That which Rad gave me two summers ago. It seems appropriate. Even as I am making my preparations I can’t quite believe that I’ve got the courage to go. I’m not altogether sure that I won’t just hang around, staking out the house and then slink home again. The bus is full, and I have to stand, lurching and swaying every time we take a corner. I feel like Marie-Antoinette in her tumbrel – and with as much confidence in the outcome of my journey. I look at the blank faces of the other passengers: they have all fallen into that stupor that afflicts people being transported to work en masse. They probably think I’m one of
them, a fellow drone. They can have no idea of the urgency of my predicament; that I’m on my way to a meeting which may decide the course of my life for years to come.
It’s Frances who opens the door. ‘Oh,’ she says, ‘it’s you.’ She doesn’t invite me in. If anything she edges the door shut by a degree or two. ‘What do you want?’ Her voice is dull – not hostile, exactly, but not warm.
‘Rad won’t answer the phone,’ I say, feeling the tears rise again. There is a swelling, like a fist in my throat.
‘That’s because he doesn’t want to talk to you.’
‘I’ve got to explain it wasn’t what he thinks.’
‘He knows you weren’t getting off with Dad,’ she says, impatiently. It sounds so strange to hear her say those words. ‘He knows Dad came in and grabbed you, because of Mum and all that. But you didn’t exactly resist. You must have known that was the one thing that Rad would really hate.’
‘I was too embarrassed. He’d just told me about your mum going off with Lawrence. He was nearly crying.’
‘How would you feel if you’d found me in my knickers on your dad’s knee?’ The image conjured up by this is so bizarre, so incongruous, that I can almost see her point of view. It’s him they’re angry with, I think. But they’re stuck with him, so it’s me who’s got to go.
‘Can I just talk to Rad?’
She shrugs and shuts the door on me, as if I’m some unsavoury caller selling double glazing or religion. A moment later she’s back. ‘He doesn’t want to see you.’ She sounds faintly apologetic. I take comfort from the fact that she doesn’t personally hate me. She glances at the book I’m holding. ‘Do you want me to give that to Rad?’
‘Yes. I’m returning it.’
‘Fair enough.’ She takes it.
‘You’re weak, Frances,’ I say with a sudden burst of courage and indignation. ‘You know I’m not to blame. You should have stuck up for me. All this is between Rad and your dad. It’s nothing to do with us.’
‘Our family’s in pieces,’ she says. ‘You’re the least of my worries.’ And with another shrug she closes the door.
39
I spend the next few days sitting in my room like a zombie, staring out of the window at a world that is newly grey. Occasionally I go for a walk to the children’s playground where I sit on the swings and cry. My presence there drives away the usual clientele, though once a group of seven- or eight-year-old boys kicks a ball around me as though I’m invisible, which I am to them. When I look into the future I can see nothing to entice me: from now on every day will be identical to the last. I will withdraw from the world and eat nothing but sprouts and potatoes. I bitterly regret giving up Goodbye to All That. Now I have nothing of Rad’s left. On Day Three (I am chalking them up in my head like a hostage) I remember Birdie. I still have Birdie; she has access to them. She will intercede for me. Forgetting that she doesn’t come to my mother’s house, I ring and beg her to come over. She knows something has happened; she has had a version of it from Frances, and is eager for details.
Mother is magnificent. I suspect that privately she is glad to have her curiosity satisfied at last. She welcomes Birdie warmly, like a special friend. ‘It’s so nice of you to come and cheer Abigail up.’ Their common knowledge of each other goes unremarked. Birdie, who is expecting to have to be smuggled in through a hatch, is completely disarmed. Mother makes a Victoria sponge for us, something she hasn’t done for months. I abandon my hunger strike: perhaps I will go the other way instead and eat myself to death. I give Birdie my account of events and she listens, brows furrowed. She takes my side as I knew she would.
‘Because he’s Frances and Rad’s father he’s in a parental relationship to you, so it’s tantamount to incest for him to touch you like that. Besides which he’s a man, he’s older, it’s his house – the power is all on his side.’ Her mother is a Samaritan and Birdie has absorbed much of the literature of counselling – on their shelves are books with titles like Leaving Violent Men and Diary of an Abuse Survivor. Within the space of twenty minutes she has half-convinced me that Mr Radley is an incipient rapist, and that my predicament is a paradigm of women’s suffering through the centuries. ‘He was totally out of order,’ is her summary, which puts me in mind of a broken toilet or vandalised phonebox. I am uneasy about this. Since calling on Frances I have begun to wonder whether I wasn’t partly to blame: behaviour ought to be dictated by more rigorous criteria than mere embarrassment after all. But it is still a relief to have my feelings of victimisation so soundly endorsed. In spite of Birdie’s grim interpretation of the incident she is happy enough to enter the rapist’s den. In fact she agrees with alacrity. ‘I’ll talk to Rad,’ she promises. ‘See if I can persuade him to ring you.’ Part of me is reluctant to let her go as it means I’ll be alone again. Her company has distracted me from my current misery, though we have talked of nothing else. She has even made me laugh. But her intervention is my last hope. It is at least a way of keeping my presence before them so they can’t erase me completely, and so I send her on her way, with the faintest of misgivings, to plead my cause.
She doesn’t contact me until the following day. She has not met with success but is evasive about the details. I sense that she is trying to spare me bad news.
‘He’s very stubborn,’ she says.
‘What did he say, exactly?’
‘That he doesn’t want to talk about it. So he didn’t.’
‘Did he seem upset, or different, or anything?’
‘Ye-e-es, he’s more withdrawn. But they’re all in a bit of a state because of Lexi going. He’s not talking to his dad. Frances is trying to hold things together. She’s the only one who is still talking to everybody.’
‘So if Rad wouldn’t discuss me, what did you do for the rest of the time?’
‘Oh, we talked about other things.’
Somehow time passes. The sun rises and sets on my misery with majestic indifference. The days are long and hot. It would have been a good summer. One afternoon I catch the bus over to Balmoral Road and spy on the house. I skulk in the oblong of shade offered by the bus shelter. By way of disguise I have a pair of sunglasses and a thirty-year-old cricket cap of my father’s which would fool no one. The only moment of excitement comes when the front door opens and Frances, still in her pyjamas, brings in the two bottles of warm sour milk from the doorstep, and disappears inside.
A fortnight of solicitude has exhausted mother. She has tried various strategies to bring me to order and has now lost all patience with me. The first of these is to occupy my time with numerous household chores, so that I won’t have time to brood. But I am too versatile for her: I can iron handkerchiefs and brood at the same time. The second is to set herself up as an example of someone who has proved resilient in the face of adversity. She has survived the breakup of a twenty-four-year marriage. There are times, she tells me, when she would have liked to go to pieces, but she Pulled Herself Together. The third and most useless of all is to hint at the greater suffering of vast portions of humanity.
At some point in August the exam results arrive. I have done well. My place at the Royal College is assured, but I can’t stir myself to celebrate. I wonder how Frances will have done, and where she will be going. She has applied without any consistency to polytechnics across the land for courses as various as Media Studies and Nursing. In the evening I find my mother at the kitchen table drinking the half-bottle of Moët & Chandon she has been keeping in the fridge in anticipation of my success. Guilt rises up in me like nausea, and I fetch myself a glass.
‘You’ll get a headache,’ I tell her.
‘I haven’t had one for ten weeks. Hadn’t you noticed?’ This is how long father has been gone. ‘It’s a miracle.’
‘Cheers,’ I say.
‘I thought I might try coffee next. See how that affects me.’
‘We could have a Chinese take-away one night.’
‘I don’t know. I think I’ll take things slowly. Don�
�t want to go mad.’
The last time I drank champagne was at Anne Trevillion’s party. At my first taste the memory unspools in my mind.
Mother pushes the rest of the bottle towards me. ‘It’s horrible stuff, champagne, isn’t it? Thank goodness we don’t often have anything to celebrate.’
I am sitting alone at my dressing table looking at my reflection and rehearsing chronologically in my mind every word Rad has ever spoken to me. The mirror has two ear flaps which can be adjusted so that you can see yourself in profile, or, with some fine tuning, from behind. Sometimes as I waggle the flaps I catch whole avenues of myself with the same bleak expression.
This exercise in remembering is not taking long. I have done the early stuff and am up to the party – my favourite bit. There can’t have been many couples for whom the word ‘Bats’ was a prelude to a kiss. ‘Don’t ever cut your hair,’ he had said. My hand automatically pulls open the dressing-table drawer, and there, amongst the brushes and bottles and tubes is a pair of scissors. Their presence is entirely providential: on one handle is a loop of ribbon with the word KITCHEN written in permanent marker. Mother uses them for cutting coupons out of magazines. Starting just below my left ear I chop roughly towards the nape of my neck and watch the swathes of hair drop to the floor. After the first cut I have a sudden attack of vertigo, but it’s too late now, so I keep going. It’s harder than you’d think to cut thick, dry hair: it slides away from the blades as they close and makes a nasty grating sound. When I have finished my head feels light and free, like a balloon whose guy-ropes have been cut. Unfortunately I look like an inmate of a Victorian orphanage or madhouse. I have been left with a lop-sided Joan of Arc cut with chewed edges and doorsteps. I shall have to start washing my neck.
On the carpet at my feet the fallen hair seems darker and duller: I gather it up and it forms a soft, jumbled nest in my lap. It would have been better, I now realise, if I had plaited it first and cut it off as one long serpent, but that would have required assistance, and self-mutilation is essentially a private business. I ransack the study for a padded envelope big enough to hold all the hair and tough enough to defeat Growth. I don’t need to disguise the writing as my hands are shaking anyway with the sheer nerve of it. Imagine the shock when he puts his hand inside and contacts all that dead stuff. I could get addicted to melodrama, I think, as I venture out, hatless and brazen, to the post-box, though this particular gesture will have to be a one-off. It would take another eighteen years to get a harvest like that.
Learning to Swim Page 29
