Learning to Swim

by Clare Chambers

  Frances gathered up an armful of junk and, without sorting it, opened her wardrobe and stuffed it on to a pile of still more junk, which was beginning to teeter as she slammed the door and locked it. From inside came the pitter patter of rubble sliding down and coming to rest against the door.

  ‘There, that’s tidied,’ said Frances, flinging herself down on the bed and extending her arms and legs, starfish style, to test its dimensions. ‘Oh this is great.’

  Privately I was shocked at her calm acceptance of the household’s new sleeping arrangements. It seemed obvious to me that her parents’ move into single beds was just the prelude to divorce. Even my parents who, heaven knew, were cool enough towards each other most of the time, still shared a double bed.

  From a white chipboard unit beside her Frances produced her journal and offered to read me some extracts.

  Dear Beatrice [I had already learned to my relief that Beatrice was not in fact a cousin or special friend but a device, borrowed from Anne Frank, to make the entries seem more personal.]

  There was a good-looking boy in Saint Michael’s uniform at the bus stop today so I decided to follow him home. I got on his bus, a 194 which I’ve never been on before, and pretty soon I was completely lost. He didn’t get off for ages and I was beginning to think it was another stupid idea of mine when he rang the bell. I had plenty of time to study the back of his neck on the bus, which was a bit sort of greasy, his neck not the bus, so I’m not quite as keen as I thought I was. Anyway I followed him at a distance and now know where he lives, though I don’t know what I’m going to do about it. Nothing, probably. I was really late home – luckily everyone else was still out. Fish was up a ladder next door putting criss-cross strips on their windows. He saw me and said ‘You’re late, been in detention, heh heh?’ and started to come down so I shot indoors. Growth went mad when he saw me and started throwing himself up against the back door so I had to take him out for a run. I didn’t want to pass Fish again so we went out the back and over the fence. I was starving when I got back and the fridge was bare so I ate a whole carton of glacé cherries out of the larder. Quite nice, though they must have been years old – I don’t think anyone here has made a cake or anything like that in my lifetime. Tried a Bonio but it was disgusting.

  I could see Frances was getting into the swing of this. She would roll around the bed, laughing and wheezing at her own exploits. Her laugh was so theatrical, so preposterous, that I couldn’t help joining in and soon we were half-way to hysterics. Encouraged by this gratifying response, Frances rattled through a few more entries, occasionally straying into dangerous terrain and having to improvise on the hoof.

  March 16th

  Dear Beatrice

  Mum made me wear her new walking boots to school today as she is going off on a ‘ramble’ with Lawrence this weekend and wants them broken in. They are pretty uncomfortable. Dr Peel caught me clumping down the corridor in them and said I’d be sent home to change if I wore them again. Honestly! It doesn’t say anything about not wearing walking boots in the school rules. It says ‘sensible brown shoes’ which they are. Abigail was wearing her hair in a bun today. It didn’t really … er, blah blah blah … Got our reports today. For Maths Mrs Taylor put ‘Frances has consolidated her position at the bottom of the class.’ Ha ha. Dad will love that. Abigail’s was brilliant as usual … er, blah blah blah. Limped half the way home then took the boots off and walked the rest of the way in my socks – or rather Rad’s socks, as they turned out to be on closer inspection.

  Dinner was late. Frances and I were dragooned into preparing vegetables: mountains of sprouts, carrots and so many potatoes that they filled a roasting tin all of their own and my peeling hand developed a wet blister. Frances’ method of preparing carrots consisted of removing the woody ends and then hewing them into unmanageable chunks like jumbo-sized batteries and tossing them unwashed into a saucepan. There appeared to be enough food for twenty. The chicken itself was the size of our Christmas turkey. I was like Gulliver in Brobdingnag. It was all so different from home, where everything was small and dainty and nicely presented and then cut into tiny pieces and chewed twenty-eight times.

  By eight thirty, when red juice was still leaking out of the chicken cavity into the surrounding lake of hot oil, and the potatoes were still waxy white and hard as new soap bars I began to worry that my parents would be wondering where I was. I crept into the front room where Lexi was curled up, still in her housecoat, reading Vogue.

  ‘May I use your telephone, please? I’ve got to ring my father and tell him what time to pick me up.’

  ‘Pick you up? I thought you were staying the night. Why don’t you tell him you’re staying, then he won’t have to come out. Hmm? I used to spend every weekend with my girlfriend, Ruthie, when I was young.’

  ‘Oh no … I … they’re expecting me back.’ My first thought was that my parents might not be able to do without me, but presently plenty of other admissible excuses came to mind. ‘I haven’t got my nightie.’

  ‘Frances will lend you something.’ There was something indefatigable about Lexi that made opposition pointless.

  ‘Well, thank you. I’ll just ring and ask permission.’

  ‘Stay the night?’ mother echoed. ‘Whatever for?’

  ‘For fun.’

  There was a silence while she turned this idea over. ‘I don’t see why not, I suppose.’ Her one condition was that I let father drive over with my night-clothes and toothbrush, which rather defeated Lexi’s object of saving him the journey. ‘And don’t forget to strip the bed in the morning. It’s very important,’ were her final words.

  11

  Father arrived just as we were dishing up dinner. Lexi, who had changed into a black velvet dress, slightly crumpled and faded around the seat, beat me to the front door. Frances was restraining Growth in the kitchen.

  ‘Hello, I’m Frances’ mother, Lexi,’ she said holding out her hand.

  ‘Stephen Onions,’ said father faintly.

  ‘You needn’t have come all this way – we could have lent Abigail some night-clothes.’

  Seeing father standing there on the doorstep in his jacket and tie, overnight bag in hand, suddenly made me feel homesick. ‘Won’t you come in for some dinner?’ Lexi was saying. ‘Or a drink?’

  ‘Oh no, I can’t stop, thanks very much. Here you are,’ he said, passing me the bag. ‘I hope you’re behaving,’ and he gave a nervous laugh.

  ‘Oh, she’s been delightful,’ said Lexi, crushing me to her side. ‘She’s cooked the dinner in fact.’

  ‘Ah-ha,’ said father, not sure if this was a joke. ‘Well, thank you for having her …’ And he withdrew into the night.

  At the dinner table Mr Radley had appeared to carve the chicken while Frances shovelled vegetables on to plates. This was my first proper sighting of him. He was smaller than I had imagined – a couple of inches shorter than his wife – with thinning brown hair, beginning to go grey from the front, and very blue eyes with a little oyster of slime in each corner. He was wearing a polo-necked sweater – something my father would have considered insufferably dandyish – tucked into trousers which were belted below a modest paunch. An elderly woman in a woolly shawl – Auntie Mim, I guessed – was sitting with her back to the coal fire which was burning even though it was a warm evening. She was pouring water into six crystal wine glasses with a shaking hand. Only Rad’s chair remained empty. Growth was circling like a shark around a wreck.

  ‘What a wonderful smell from that bird,’ Auntie Mim said. ‘No, I won’t have any, thank you.’ Frances had forewarned me that Auntie Mim had existed on nothing but sprouts, potatoes and weak tea for as long as anybody could remember. As if this was not odd enough, nobody was allowed to refer to this peculiar habit, but continued to offer her chicken and carrots and gravy which she would, after some consideration, politely decline as if on a whim of the moment.

  ‘Any stuffing for you, Auntie?’ said Lexi.

  ‘Er, do y
ou know, I don’t think I will, thank you.’

  After a few minutes I began to envy her restraint: helpings were enormous. Mr Radley had given me a whole leg – hip, thigh, calf, ankle and all – which I had no idea how to tackle. I only ever had the white meat at home. I don’t know where my mother bought our chickens, but they must have been reared without bones. Just as the last plate was set down, steaming, at Rad’s empty place there came the sound of footsteps clumping down two flights of stairs and the latecomer walked in, a book under one arm. He slid into his seat without a word and immediately propped the book open against the sprout dish. Albert Camus The Plague, it said on the spine.

  ‘For every cup and every plateful Father make us truly grateful,’ said Mr Radley suddenly, in a booming voice, making us all jump. It was only when everyone else had started tutting and telling him not to be stupid that I realised he was joking. This I found rather shocking, as mother said grace in all seriousness in our house, usually at some length and invoking the starving of other lands to blackmail me into clearing my plate. He gave me a wink which made me blush, and every time I caught his eye afterwards he would do it again, enjoying my embarrassment.

  ‘Rad, I thought we’d agreed you could read at breakfast but not at dinner,’ said his mother reasonably.

  ‘Hmmph,’ he grunted without looking up from the page.

  ‘It’s not as if we eat together all that often,’ she went on.

  ‘Oh, cranberries,’ Auntie Mim was saying, picking up the sauce dish. ‘Wonderful piquant flavour.’

  ‘Precisely,’ said Rad.

  ‘No, not for me, thank you dear.’

  ‘Why should I have to fit in with an arrangement that’s not even regular?’

  Everyone but me was making great headway with their dinner. Frances had nearly cleared her plate, while I was still wrestling with bone and sinew. Every time I tried to dig my knife and fork into the chicken leg it would swivel round on the plate and kick sprouts and carrots on to the table. I spent as much time fielding as eating. The heat in the room was tremendous, with the coal fire, the steam from the plates and Growth lying panting across my feet. I could feel his little golf ball pressing against my ankle, and didn’t dare move. The windows ran with condensation. The others, apart from Auntie Mim, were on to second helpings before I could even see the pattern on my plate. My wine glass seemed to have developed a slow puncture – every time I put it to my lips water would drip down the stem and into my lap.

  Mr Radley took pity on me. ‘You’re not going to eat that, are you?’ he said, pointing at the chicken leg, which looked even bigger now, since its mauling.

  ‘No,’ I admitted meekly.

  ‘Good. I was hoping you’d say that.’ He leant across and speared it with his fork and removed it to his own plate, leaving a trail of gravy droplets between us.

  ‘You’re all dressed up,’ he said to his wife, noticing for the first time. ‘Are you going anywhere?’

  ‘Just to the golf club with Clarissa for a drink,’ said Mrs Radley. Clarissa was her younger, unmarried sister who enjoyed a wild bachelor-girl existence in Sevenoaks. ‘In fact,’ she looked at her watch, ‘she’s picking me up at nine thirty.’

  Suddenly it was all over. ‘God, is that the time?’ said Mr Radley, knocking his chair over as he leapt up. He departed for work still clutching the chicken leg. Rad took this as his cue to vanish back upstairs, and Mrs Radley was borne off to the golf club in a cloud of peppery scent leaving Frances and me to clear up. Auntie Mim was still at the table finishing her sprouts. It was good to see that there was someone slower than me.

  Later in Frances’ room we undressed shyly with our backs to each other. Mum had packed my least favourite nightie – a green nylon one which made me itch the moment I put it on. In the dressing-table mirror I could see Frances wriggling out of her bra. She was the only girl in the class who wore one, a fact advertised by her evident discomfort and perpetual fiddling with the straps. She peeled back the brushed nylon sheets with a ripping sound of static and a crackle of blue sparks. In my fleecy nightie I was going to stick to them like Velcro. Having spent some time brushing her teeth, Frances produced a tin of treacle toffee from the bedside cabinet, and we sat up in bed, jaws locked, trying to chew and giggling and dribbling all at the same time.

  ‘What do you think of Rad?’ Frances asked through a brace of toffee.

  ‘All right,’ I replied, blushing through the lie. After all, she had been building him up for months until I was determined that if he wasn’t truly hideous I was going to fall headlong in love with him.

  ‘All right?’ she echoed, indignantly. ‘Well, you haven’t seen him at his best yet.’

  Frances wrote up her journal for the day while I politely averted my eyes, and then she switched off the light, leaving the room semi-lit by the streetlamp outside and the sweep of car headlights. The traffic noise was deafening after The Close. The mattress was as slack as a hammock and we kept sinking into the middle and clashing elbows, so I lay as near as possible to the edge of the bed, clinging on with fingers and toes like a sloth to stop myself rolling back into the trench. Within minutes Frances was asleep and breathing evenly, while I counted the cars as they whooshed by outside until twelve, when I heard Mrs Radley come in and retire, singing lightly, to her single bed. I dozed off not long after and dreamed I was hanging on to the edge of a cliff. Much later I was woken by the sound of Mr Radley returning from work. There was the grating of a key in the lock, the click of the door shutting and then a crash as he tripped over something in the hallway followed by swearing.

  In the morning while Frances was in the bathroom I dressed quickly and, remembering mother’s instructions, set about stripping the bed. I had everything piled neatly on the bare mattress and was just peeling off the last pillowcase when Frances came back in.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she said, thunderstruck. ‘Mum,’ she appealed to Mrs Radley who was just whisking across the landing in a bathrobe and turban, ‘she’s just taken all the sheets off my bed.’

  Mrs Radley took in my red face and the bare mattress and said, ‘Well, that’s because it’s the polite thing to do.’

  ‘I’ve never heard of it before.’

  ‘Nevertheless …’

  ‘I’m going to have to put them all back again now,’ said Frances, aggrieved.

  ‘No you’re not. You’re going to take them up to the launderette. I’ve got some blankets that can go in the big machine while you’re up there.’

  ‘Well done, Abigail,’ said Frances scowling, and looking exactly like her brother.

  ‘How was I to know you’d be sharing?’ said mother, as I related the bed-stripping incident in some dudgeon on my return. She was in the kitchen making Yorkshire pudding batter, whisking it ferociously to get rid of the lumps. Father was off somewhere. ‘Whoever heard of a girl that age having a double bed?’ And she wrinkled her nose as though, even at this distance, she could smell dirty linen.

  12

  This was the beginning of my absorption into the Radley family. It was taken for granted that I would spend my weekends there: this was what Lexi used to do with her girlfriend, Ruthie, as she was fond of telling us.

  ‘Whatever happened to Ruthie?’ Frances asked her mother after their exemplary friendship had been invoked half a dozen times in one evening.

  ‘I don’t know,’ came the unromantic reply. ‘We drifted apart as soon as we left school. As you do.’

  Frances and I exchanged a look. Things must have been different in those days: there was no way we were going to ‘drift’.

  The only people who weren’t thrilled by the new arrangement were my parents. In their civilised way they did not get on especially well and needed me there as a distraction. In the absence of fights and arguments, it was hard to see exactly what was the cause of their disenchantment – I wasn’t sure whether the chill had always existed and was only now apparent to my maturer self, or whether it was something recent. One bone of
contention was the amount of time my father spent on his Project, a perpetually expanding work that gave him ample scope for disappearance on research-related errands or long sojourns in his study. Although my mother was no doubt happy to have him ‘out from under her feet’, an expression which put me in mind of a ruckled carpet, the intangibility of all his labour infuriated her: it was not like making quince jelly, which could be eaten or given to the church fête, or ironing, which simply had to be done. It rankled that what was so obviously a hobby should have acquired the status of work.

  It was during this time that my mother’s mania for cleanliness reached its height. At least that’s how it seemed: perhaps it was just the coincidence of my exposure to the Radley household where a less rigorous regime prevailed. Visitors to our house used to flatter mother by saying they could have eaten their dinner off the kitchen floor: at the Radleys’ it generally looked as though someone just had.

  Mother’s latest acquisition in her war against dirt was a carpet cleaner, picked up at a church bazaar. It was a pale yellow plastic gadget, like a small upright hoover, which had to be filled with special shampoo and dragged back and forth across the floor, leaving trails of foam like spittle in its path. She became quite infatuated with this machine, and for a while there was always at least one carpet in the house that smelled of chemical soap and felt damp and mossy underfoot. Housework became a sort of retreat for her: where a more histrionic person, and one less prone to migraine, might have pounded out her frustration on a piano, mother resorted to the mop and duster. One morning I looked out of my bedroom window and saw her trying to sweep the front path during a high wind. There she was, teeth clenched, wielding her broom while dust and grit and fallen blossom whirled around her.