‘She’s sent me a home video of the family for my birthday,’ she said. ‘I made Lawrence go out and buy a VCR yesterday. When I went to bed at midnight he was still trying to tune the damn thing in, so I don’t know whether we’ll ever get to see it.’
‘Is she good at keeping in contact?’
‘Not bad. Better at phoning than writing. We’ve been to see them twice now. When I’m really decrepit I shall go there every year to escape the winter. Imagine never having to endure an English February. You know Rad’s leaving me again?’
‘Yes. Not permanently though.’
‘Well, that’s what he said last time – and then he comes back for all of six months and spends half that time in plaster. What about you? You’re not dashing off anywhere, are you? No, you wouldn’t desert your parents.’ She shot a reproachful glance across the garden at Rad who was talking to Uncle Bill.
‘No. I’m staying put.’
‘Good, then you must come and see us. Do you play bridge?’
I said I didn’t.
‘Lawrence will teach you. You’ll enjoy it.’
I could feel it happening already, the assimilation. Within minutes Lexi would be lending me Lawrence’s cottage in the Tarn, trying to put me up for membership of her health club, marking me down as a house-sitter, granny-sitter and fourth man at bridge if I didn’t watch myself. She was amazed and impressed to discover that I still played the cello, and with an orchestra she had heard of, possibly even heard, though she wasn’t a hundred per cent sure on that point. ‘You must get me tickets,’ was her parting instruction as she was summoned by Clarissa to greet more guests.
I joined Rad, now grazing at the food table, which was in the middle of the garden protected by a striped canopy. Every so often the whole structure would lurch as someone tripped, cursing, over one of the guy ropes.
‘I’m back in the family,’ I said, watching him steal the topmost of a pyramid of strawberries. ‘After only fifteen minutes.’
‘It’s a good thing I’m going abroad,’ he replied. ‘Being Mum’s daughter-in-law is going to take up all your time – I’d just be in the way.’
I began to protest that I’d envisaged being married rather than colonised, but Rad cut me short by popping a strawberry into my mouth.
‘Don’t do that,’ I said, trying to sound cross. ‘People will guess.’
‘Let them.’ He picked up a stack of meringues and a filament of smoked salmon. ‘Come on, let’s circulate. The quicker we get round everybody, the quicker we can go.’
I’m not sure whether on occasions like this people are simply glad to see a representative of the next generation or whether Rad was popular for being Lexi’s son or on his own account, but within the confines of this garden he seemed to have achieved an enviable measure of celebrity. Even those friends of Lexi’s he didn’t know knew all about him. After hearing Rad answer the same questions about Senegal and his motorbike accident and the near incineration of Wentworth half a dozen times, it occurred to me that I hadn’t yet set eyes on our host, so I slipped back to the food table and picked up a plate of coronation chicken and headed indoors.
In the kitchen Clarissa was arranging flowers in a selection of vases, buckets and beer mugs. The floor was strewn with discarded leaves.
‘Is Lawrence around?’
She paused in the act of smashing the ends of some long-stemmed roses with a meat tenderiser. ‘Probably still trying to plumb in the video.’ She glanced at my plate. ‘Oh, that’s a good idea – take him something to eat. He’ll miss the whole party at this rate.’
I found him crouched on the sitting-room floor, surrounded by polythene and cardboard and chunks of moulded polystyrene. In front of him sat the video machine, trailing wires, the word ERR flashing ominously in the display panel. He was studying an instruction booklet which had been ripped into pieces and then sellotaped back together.
‘I just cannot … oh this bloody …’ he was saying through clenched teeth, as I announced my presence with a cough. He swung round and for a moment a frown lingered on his face, and then turned to a look of recognition and delight. ‘Abigail, what a lovely surprise.’ He stood up and kissed me on both cheeks. His hair was quite white now, but there was plenty of it and his face was tanned. He was still handsome. He pointed an accusing finger at me. ‘You’ve come with Rad, haven’t you?’
I nodded. ‘It’s so nice to see everyone.’ We glanced at the debris at our feet.
‘You’ve just saved me a couple of hundred pounds,’ he said.
‘How?’
‘Because when you came in I was on the point of picking this thing up and throwing it through the window.’
‘I see the manual has already taken some punishment,’ I said, smiling.
‘That was at midnight last night, when Lexi accused me of not reading the instructions properly. You know I don’t think people kill their wives over big things like adultery. I think it’s little things – like this.’
I nodded. ‘I was just reading in the paper the other day about a man who killed his lover during an argument about the best way to marinade a chicken.’
‘Exactly,’ said Lawrence. ‘I hope the jury was lenient.’
‘Would you like some chicken, by the way?’ I said, offering him my untouched plate. ‘You’re going to miss out on the food if you’re not careful.’
He accepted gratefully. ‘You are kind. You’ll come and see us again properly, won’t you? Lexi will need consoling when Rad goes away.’
I promised I would. ‘I don’t play bridge, though,’ I warned.
‘Oh, that’s all right. I’m sure Lexi will find other ways you can be useful,’ and we both laughed disloyally.
Just before I left to rejoin the party Lawrence pointed out a painting on the wall. It was a watercolour of a stone cottage, delphiniums and geraniums in the foreground, fields and copses in the middle distance and a rocky plateau at the horizon. It was rather good.
‘Lexi did it,’ he said, gratified by my expression of surprise. ‘It’s our cottage in France. It turns out she’s got some talent in that direction.’
In the garden Lexi, from the comfort of a deck-chair, was canvassing the guests for expertise in electrical gadgetry. Rad was sitting in the shade of the apple tree eating his fifth meringue and being lectured by Cecile on the decline of modern manners. She had observed that men of his generation no longer stood when a woman came into the room. Rad wanted to know whether the rule applied to gardens. ‘I mean, there are people to-ing and fro-ing all the time here: I’d be bobbing up and down like a jack-in-a-box.’ Nevertheless he offered me his deck-chair and was about to fetch me a bowl of strawberries when there was a muffled howl from inside the house. A moment later Lawrence appeared at the french windows waving a white handkerchief.
‘Oh, leave the machine and come and join the party,’ said Lexi. ‘We’ll have to get a man in.’ I could imagine her later, going through her diary.
Soon afterwards, as the main detachment of guests began to depart, Rad signalled that he was ready to go.
‘Don’t get up,’ he insisted, keeping one hand on Lexi’s shoulder as he kissed her goodbye.
‘Now ring me next week, Abigail, and we’ll arrange a time for you to come over,’ said Lexi from the deck-chair.
I said I would make a note of it, congratulating myself on having escaped without the dresses, and we waved a general goodbye to the remnant of visitors.
The front door had only just closed behind us and I was savouring that moment of pleasant introspection and relief which always makes leaving a party the most enjoyable bit, when there was a loud tooting from the kerb below and a man in a dirty white estate car gestured to us impatiently. He seemed to be restricted in his movements by a large, flat board the width of the car which extended from the back windscreen to the nape of his neck as he sat almost pinioned against the wheel.
‘Oh blast!’ said Rad. ‘If we’d only left two minutes earlier.’ He strode to
wards the car and pulled the passenger door open.
‘Don’t just stand there, get the boot open,’ the man ordered, ripping the keys out of the ignition and flinging them at Rad. It was only when I heard his voice that I recognised Mr Radley. Between us Rad and I managed to remove the package, which was about six by four, wrapped in brown paper, and which proved surprisingly light, and stand it on the kerbside up against the wing, while Mr Radley climbed out of the driver’s seat looking crumpled and harassed. He was fatter and balder, and to compensate for the diminishing hair on his head had grown a rather lush beard. ‘I’ve driven all the way from Highbury like that,’ he complained, still not acknowledging me. ‘If anyone had hit me in the rear I’d have been decapitated.’ He peered at me like someone who ought to wear glasses but doesn’t. ‘It’s Blush. For a moment there I thought Rad had got a new girlfriend,’ he said, reintroducing me in a few brief words to his peculiar brand of tactlessness. ‘What have you been doing all these years then? Married? Children?’
‘No, nothing like that.’
‘Neither’s Rad. Perhaps you could marry each other.’ He turned to Rad. ‘You could do a lot worse. Seriously.’
‘Thank you,’ said Rad. ‘I’ll bear it in mind.’
‘Anyway, I can’t stand here chatting,’ said Mr Radley, as if we were the ones who had waylaid him, ‘or I’ll miss the party.’
‘You already have missed it,’ said Rad. ‘You’re three hours late.’
‘Is your mother angry?’ he asked.
‘No. Somehow the other thirty guests managed to hold things together.’
‘All right, all right, no need to be sarcastic. She’ll forgive me everything when she sees my present anyway. Such an incredible stroke of luck.’
‘What is it?’ asked Rad, trying to peep through a flap in the brown paper.
‘I always regretted selling it, because it was after all an act of homage. To your mother. And about six weeks ago I was browsing round this junk shop – well, antique shop, really – in Camden, and I found it again. My guess is the person who bought it must have died and house clearers took the lot. It still had a sticker on the back – Second prize: Lazarus Ohene. I can’t wait to see her face.’
‘What are you laughing at?’ Rad asked as we drove back towards the city.
‘It’s a family secret,’ I said. ‘Listen …’
49
That was some months ago. I am happily married now, and alone. Rad has gone back to Senegal, which I look at on the Times Map of the World on my kitchen wall but can form no picture of. He writes often – unexpectedly funny, romantic letters without any hint of the National Geographic about them. Sometimes he phones, but the line is usually bad, we end up having to shout, and endearments lose something when bellowed. It makes him seem further away rather than nearer, so I prefer the letters. Restoration work on Wentworth is nearly complete. Sometimes on Sundays I go over there to check on its progress. Then I lie on the bed and look at the moon between the new curtains I have made and reflect on the fact that eighteen months is not long to wait to be happy, that time passes quickly even when we want it to, and that nothing – grief, ecstasy, even tattoos – can last for ever.
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One day 34-year-old Esther Fairchild sees a face in the crowd that brings back a past she’s been trying to forget. Memories flood back of her eccentric childhood, in which she and her brother were virtually left to fend for themselves in a large shabby house, surrounded by their parents’ rich collection of feckless ‘guests’.
Into this shambolic world came Donovan – regularly deposited by his unreliable mother – and Penny, Christian’s girlfriend and Esther’s idol. Until tragedy struck and shattered all their lives. But now, it seems, their lives are about to become intertwined once more …
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On the brink of forty, newly single with a failed business, Philip thought he’d reached an all-time low. It only needed a discarded chip on a South London street to lay him literally flat.
So, bedbound and bored, Philip naturally starts to write the story of his life. But the mundane catalogue of seaside holidays and bodged DIY, broken relationships and unspoken truths, reveals more surprises, both comic and touching, than Philip or his family ever bargained for. Even, perhaps, a happy ending …
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In 1976 four students took a trip to the desert. Now the repercussions of that fateful summer are coming back to haunt them.
And repercussions are just what Guy doesn’t need: his wife, Jane, is moving swiftly from slightly eccentric to downright peculiar, their three-year-old daughter seems set on destroying Jane’s sanity, and now even God’s gone quiet on him.
As for Nina, she’s having enough trouble with her son, James. He’s got exams looming, a new girlfriend with pneumatic breasts and now, it seems, he’s on drugs. Nina certainly won’t welcome any ghosts from the past.
Life isn’t going smoothly for anyone. But when Hugo, long-forgotten agent of misfortune, threatens to pay them all a visit, disaster seems unavoidable.
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‘Thoroughly enjoyable and very clever’
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When aspiring novelist Christopher Flinders drops out of university to write his masterpiece (in between shifts as a fish delivery man and builder’s mate), his family is sceptical.
But when he is taken up by the London editor Owen Goddard and his charming wife Diana it seems success is just around the corner. Christopher’s life has so far been rather short of charm – growing up in an unlovely suburb, with unambitious parents and a semi-vagrant brother – and he is captivated by his generous and cultured mentors.
However, on the brink of realising his dream, Christopher makes a desperate misjudgement which results in disaster for all involved. Shattered, he withdraws from London and buries himself in rural Yorkshire, embracing a career and a private life marked by mediocrity.
Twenty years on, a young academic researching into Owen Goddard seeks him out, and Christopher is forced to exhume his past, setting him on a path to a life-changing discovery.
THIS IS JUST THE BEGINNING
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Cornerstone is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.
First published in Great Britain by Century in 1998
First published in paperback by Arrow in 2005
This edition published in paperback by Arrow in 2021
Reissued by Arrow in 2021
Copyright © Clare Chambers 1998
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Cover design and illustration: Edward Bettison
Art direction: Emma Grey Gelder
Inspired by original art direction by Steve Marking
ISBN: 978-1-446-44105-3
This ebook i
s copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
Learning to Swim Page 36
