Learning to Swim

by Clare Chambers

  From my point of view there was an added poignancy to this meeting: it would be the last time I would see Rad before he went off to university. He would be gone for ten weeks at a time, returning only for vacations or the odd weekend, and in the meantime there would be girls there, girls who had Done It no doubt, and who would be living in the same hall, on the same landing, and dropping in for coffee at any hour of the day or night to discuss Nietzsche. Envisioning this always made me feel slightly giddy and breathless, but I comforted myself with the thought that he would not be there for ever, and that whatever these imagined rivals might enjoy by way of beauty or intelligence, they would not have my patience. It was just a matter of waiting for him to recognise me, and when he did I would be ready and it would all have been worthwhile.

  The object of this meticulously planned passivity was sitting at the bar reading an Ordnance Survey map of the Somme when we walked in. He slid off his barstool as soon as he saw us and came to help with our cases. He kissed Lexi and Frances and then sort of twitched in my direction but obviously thought the better of it and just gave me a nod and a smile. Perhaps it was just as well – last time we had had skin to skin contact he had left a scorch mark on my forehead.

  ‘Where’s your dad?’ said Lexi, looking round.

  ‘Just getting changed. He tipped a whole plate of oeufs à la neige into his lap at supper.’ He dragged more stools up to the bar.

  ‘How’s it been?’ asked Lexi sympathetically. ‘I bet you’ve been bearing up marvellously.’

  ‘We haven’t had any catastrophes,’ Rad said, ‘but he’s been driving me nuts. I’m definitely inter-railing next year. I know he’s a creature of habit, but I swear he’s getting worse with age – he always wants to go to the same places. I tried to tell him that we were hardly any distance from Agincourt, and that the field of Waterloo was only about an hour’s drive, but he flatly refused to go. So we’ve done the same old tour as every other year: Ypres, Beaumont Hamel, Delville Wood, Thiepval.’ He tapped the map in front of him. ‘He must have memorised every name on the Menin Gate by now. The only place we’ve missed out is Vimy Ridge.’

  ‘Poor Rad,’ said Lexi soothingly.

  ‘But he’s so obsessive,’ Rad went on. He had one hand in his hair as if driven to tear clumps of it out. ‘There’s this chip van in the square at Cambrai that we always stop at on the way down. I don’t know why; they’re not particularly good chips. But we got held up and when we arrived lunch was over and it was all shut up. And Dad threw the most unbelievable tantrum. I thought he was going to burst into tears and stamp his foot.’

  ‘At least you could drive this time, Rad,’ said Frances. ‘That must have made it easier.’

  ‘We shared the driving,’ he admitted. ‘I couldn’t insist on doing it all. I didn’t want to emasculate him.’

  Mr Radley appeared in the doorway of the bar still doing up his shirt. ‘Ah, bonjour,’ he cried, bearing down on us with arms flung out, cuffs flapping.

  ‘Oh God, that’s another thing,’ Rad whispered to me and Frances as Lexi advanced to meet her husband and kisses were exchanged. ‘He always wants to send me into bars and cafés ahead of him so he can come in a few minutes later and do all this “bonjour, bonjour” stuff and slap me on the back. I used to find it funny when I was about twelve, but it’s just bloody embarrassing now.’

  ‘Hello girls,’ said Mr Radley. ‘You look brown, Frances, and Blush you look, er, pink.’

  ‘Rad says you’ve had a successful trip,’ Lexi lied smoothly.

  ‘Well, we’ve had one or two hitches. That damned chip van in Cambrai. And we haven’t managed to get to Vimy yet – I thought we’d go tomorrow …’

  When, some time later, Lexi announced she was ready for bed, Mr Radley slapped two sets of keys on the bar. ‘Rad and I have been sharing, but I booked two rooms for tonight, so what do we want to do? Boys in one, girls in the other? Or are you in with me tonight, Lex?’

  ‘Well, that depends on whether Abigail minds sleeping in the same room as Rad.’

  ‘Oh, she won’t mind,’ said Mr Radley with great confidence. The two of them often discussed me, affectionately, as if I wasn’t there.

  ‘You can’t just assume that,’ said Lexi. ‘Some girls might find it very intimidating.’

  ‘I wouldn’t call Rad intimidating – look at him,’ said Mr Radley. Rad was almost asleep at the bar, his head resting on his folded arms.

  ‘Who says I’m not intimidating?’ Rad protested sleepily, without looking up.

  ‘I didn’t mean Rad,’ said Lexi. ‘I meant that some girls of Abigail’s age might be uncomfortable at the thought of sharing with a boy.’

  ‘Well, why don’t you ask her?’ said Frances, a trifle impatiently.

  Mr Radley turned to me. ‘Well, Blush?’

  ‘Who me?’ I said. ‘I’d sort of forgotten I was here.’ And they all laughed at that, even Rad, who had sat up. I was in a predicament now. To agree too hastily would be like a slight to Lexi’s sensitivity on my behalf. ‘I don’t really mind,’ I said. Mr Radley picked up one set of keys and slid the other across the table towards me.

  ‘I notice no one’s asked if I mind,’ Rad called after his parents’ departing backs.

  ‘He’s done nothing but moan all week,’ said Mr Radley to Lexi loudly on their way out. ‘I don’t think I’ll invite him next year.’

  I didn’t sleep well. To avoid undressing in front of Rad I had stayed behind in the bar alone for a few minutes on the pretext of writing a postcard home – a transparently trumped up excuse: we would be back within thirty-six hours. By the time I went up the other two were both apparently asleep; a tuft of hair on the pillow was all that was visible of Rad above the sheet. Frances, in the double bed, had managed to work herself across the diagonal, and gentle kicks from me failed to stir her, so I had to be content with curling up in the small triangle of unoccupied mattress. It was a hot night and the windows were closed against the pounding music from the square. Throwing off the covers I lay perspiring into the pillow. Frances, still unrousable, had not shifted over – she had, if anything, edged closer to me. I could feel the heat coming off her body against my back. At half-past one, when the noise from the funfair finally stopped, I slipped out of bed to open the window, setting floorboards, loose as piano keys, creaking and banging under my feet.

  ‘Who’s that?’ whispered a voice from the corner bed.

  ‘Abigail. I’m just letting some air in.’ There was the crack of fused paintwork separating as the window shuddered open, and warm soupy air, faintly redolent of chip fat and cigarette smoke, wafted through the shutters.

  ‘I can’t seem to sleep,’ said Rad.

  ‘Neither can I.’

  ‘It was that racket out there. And the heat.’

  ‘This should be better.’ I fanned the window back and forth a few times to cool my face before getting back into bed. ‘We should be able to sleep now,’ I said, but the thought of us both lying in the dark, awake, listening to each other’s breathing, proved too great a distraction and I remained tired but sleepless until the early hours.

  ‘I don’t know what it is with you young girls nowadays,’ said Mr Radley as we took our places at the breakfast table the following morning. ‘Is the intention to look as ugly as possible? Or is the dowdiness of your clothes meant to be a foil to your beauty?’

  Frances and I were at that time disciples of a fashion whose watchword was Sloppy. She was wearing a black T-shirt several sizes too big over a not very clean jersey skirt which reached to her ankles and bagged around the seat and knees when she sat down. I had on a long, shapeless denim tunic, faded almost white by repeated washing, and a green T-shirt which I had attempted to dye black but which had come out the colour of seaweed, and blotchy. Flat shoes and a slouching gait were the necessary accompaniment.

  ‘It doesn’t occur to you that you’re not the sort of person they’re hoping to attract?’ suggested Lexi.

  ‘They loo
k all right to me,’ said Rad.

  ‘Perhaps we’ve just got more important things to worry about than our appearance,’ said Frances indignantly.

  ‘Such as?’ said Mr Radley.

  Furrows of concentration appeared on Frances’ brow as she delved in vain for an answer.

  ‘I don’t know,’ sighed Mr Radley. ‘It seems such a waste somehow. It won’t be long before you’re hideous old hags of forty and it won’t matter a damn what you wear.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Lexi.

  Mr Radley drew me aside after breakfast as I waited on the landing for Frances to retrieve her camera from the bedroom. There was a flake of croissant on his chin which I longed to brush away, and a further flurry of crumbs down the front of his shirt. He was the messiest eater I had ever seen: the fallout from a single piece of baguette could reach all four corners of the table.

  ‘I suppose you girls have spent all your money on knickknacks, eh?’ he said.

  I shook my head – apart from my Dutch language Louvre catalogue I had only bought a T-shirt with the word NICE stamped ambiguously across the chest. (It was destined to have only one outing, when it would be deemed cheap and nasty by mother and thereafter consigned to a bottom drawer.) Lexi had refused any contributions towards food and petrol, so my sheaf of notes was still largely intact.

  ‘Oh, well, in that case you couldn’t lend me a hundred francs, could you? Yes? Oh, that’s splendid. I’ve run out and it’s not worth cashing another cheque for one day. Actually, better make it two hundred.’

  As promised we spent the morning at Vimy Ridge. We had decided to squeeze into one car. Lexi, Frances and I were in the back; Rad was driving. Every few miles Mr Radley would point out another cemetery at the roadside – rows and rows of identical gravestones like so many white teeth rising from the turf.

  ‘Just look, Blush,’ Mr Radley said, turning round the better to catch my expression. ‘Thousands of them, just names on stones. And yet every one was once a living, breathing human being – probably just like Rad here – and most of them volunteers, fresh out of school with everything still to come, the brightest and best of their generation.’ As the only newcomer to the experience I was singled out to be the recipient of Mr Radley’s wisdom and opinions. My ignorance of even the baldest facts about the First World War appalled him. I could just about summon up the dates; Archduke Ferdinand, Haig, Sir John French, Kaiser Wilhelm were just names from the void. They could have been racehorses.

  ‘You don’t know when the Battle of the Somme was? Dear God in heaven, what do they teach you at that school? I suppose, living with Frances, I ought to be used to ignorance on that level but, honestly, I expected better of you, Abigail.’ I was used to being hectored in this vein by Mr Radley. Anyone who hadn’t managed to acquire precisely the same body of knowledge as himself was an object of pity and derision: to know any less was evidence of imbecility; to know more was pointless, sterile, academic.

  ‘If they’ve never been taught it, how can they know it?’ said Lexi reasonably.

  ‘I know, I know, it’s their education. If that’s not too strong a word for it. Have you read Goodbye to All That? No, of course you haven’t. It’s a great book. I reread it every year. I’ll lend you my copy.’

  I apologised for my stupidity and said I would certainly read Goodbye to All That. ‘But I won’t borrow it. I’ll buy my own copy. If I’m going to take the trouble to read a book, I like to be able to keep it.’ I could well imagine what sort of condition Mr Radley’s copy would be in. Only that morning at breakfast he had picked Lexi’s new hardback biography of Jackie Onassis out of her bag, and finding several of the back pages still uncut had seized his buttery knife and tried to hack them apart.

  ‘You don’t want to take too much notice of Dad’s version of the war,’ said Rad, glancing at me in the driver’s mirror. ‘He likes to romanticise. He thinks everyone who died at the Front was a poet.’

  ‘It was a romantic war. It was about innocence and sacrifice – concepts which I wouldn’t expect your heartless generation to understand. Can you imagine any eighteen-year-olds today rushing off to enlist?’

  ‘Well, that’s an advance, surely?’ said Rad.

  ‘Look, there’s Vimy,’ said Mr Radley, glad to duck out of an argument in which he was in danger of being worsted. In the distance in a chiselled-out clearing on the wooded ridge stood a monument like a great white tuning fork against the sky.

  The sun was just emerging from behind the only cloud in the sky as Rad pulled into the car-park. Behind barbed-wire fencing I could see shallow snaking trenches, eroded now and smothered in closely cropped grass. Slender fir trees striped the sky. Entrée interdite: munitions non éclatées, read the signs.

  ‘They’re still finding unexploded shells even now,’ said Mr Radley. ‘It happens all over here – every year you hear that some poor kid has wandered into the woods and got himself blown up.’ He appointed himself my personal tour guide and led me down into the Canadian trenches, preserved with concrete sandbags and duckboards, and made me stand at one of the machine-gun turrets and peer through the hole in the rusty metal at the giant craters which divided us from the German front line not forty yards away.

  ‘Why did they make the trenches zigzag like this?’ I asked.

  ‘To stop the Germans firing along the length of the trench if it was captured. Of course it also made carrying stretchers rather difficult.’

  It didn’t seem possible that we were standing on the site of such carnage. The sun was warm; a gentle breeze was stirring the leaves; the trenches, clean and dry and empty, looked almost cosy; a golden cloud of midges shimmered above our heads; two young boys were rolling down the steep sides of the largest crater shrieking with laughter.

  ‘There can hardly be anyone left alive who remembers all this,’ said Mr Radley, pressing himself against the side of the trench to avoid being stampeded by giggling, panting children. ‘And when my generation is dead there won’t be anyone left who cares.’

  ‘There’ll be me,’ said Rad, who had caught us up. ‘I care. I’m just not morbidly sentimental like you.’ By now I was thoroughly used to the adversarial style with which Mr Radley was often addressed by his wife and children and it no longer took me by surprise. I wouldn’t be trying it out at home, though.

  Frances and Lexi had walked ahead towards the memorial. Frances was cooing and clicking her fingers at a group of skinny sheep which were cropping the hummocks of grass on the ridge. One stopped chewing for a moment and fixed us with a blank stare as we approached.

  ‘Ah, sheep!’ cried Mr Radley warmly. ‘Symbol of innocence.’

  ‘And stupidity,’ said Rad.

  The wind was stronger on the ridge, snapping at the French and Canadian flags which stood at the approach to the monument, and whipping my hair into my watering eyes.

  ‘You can see why this was such an important strategic gain,’ said Mr Radley, gesturing with his arm. Below and beyond us the plain stretched away, strings of tiny houses dwarfed by volcanic-looking slag heaps. Plumes of white smoke rose from chimney stacks thin as pencils.

  ‘Did any of our family fight in the war?’ asked Frances, who had been inspecting the carved names of the dead around the base of the monument.

  ‘No, my dear, you come from a long line of cowards,’ said Mr Radley, patting her on the shoulder.

  ‘I can’t believe so many people died,’ I said, indicating the lists of names that Frances was scrutinising for fallen Radleys.

  ‘That’s nothing,’ said Rad. ‘You should see the Menin Gate. Vimy doesn’t really give you any idea of what it would have been like – it’s all been smartened up. It looks more like a crazy-golf course than a battlefield. If you want to see some real trenches you should go to Hill 62. There’s a fantastic old museum there too.’

  ‘Is it near?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s in Belgium. Ypres. Do you want to see it? We could get there and back in an afternoon on the motorway.’ He seeme
d suddenly excited at the prospect.

  ‘Well, I don’t want to sit in the car for hours just to see another lot of graves and stuff,’ said Frances.

  ‘I bet Abigail has had to fit in with what you want to do all holiday,’ said Rad. Before I could protest that I wasn’t bothered one way or another, Rad was herding everyone back to the car-park, issuing orders. It was all arranged: Frances and Lexi would be dropped back in Arras and the two men and I would drive to Ypres. The fact that they had already visited the place once this week was no deterrent, apparently. Afterwards I would remember this incident as being the first time Rad had ever shown me special consideration that went beyond mere politeness.

  Some ten miles the wrong side of Ypres, Mr Radley, who was driving, suddenly leaned across Rad and started rummaging in the glove compartment, sending an avalanche of sweet wrappers on to the floor. ‘God, don’t you girls ever throw anything in the bin?’ he demanded, as the car swerved towards the central reservation. Rad grabbed the wheel. ‘That’s right – you steer for a minute.’ At last he found what he was looking for – a cassette, which he flipped out of its box with one hand while retaking the wheel with the other. ‘I thought we’d have some appropriate music – I got Bill to tape this on his fancy machine. Do you know Britten’s War Requiem? No, of course you don’t.’ He snapped it into the tape machine and turned the volume up high. After a few minutes of punishing noise, Rad ventured to turn the sound down a fraction.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ asked Mr Radley. ‘Don’t you like it?’

  ‘No,’ said Rad.

  ‘It sounds a bit slow and dirge-like,’ I said.

  ‘Well of course it is, it’s a bloody requiem. You don’t expect the dance of the sugar-plum fairy. You are a pair of philistines, really. I admit Britten’s an acquired taste,’ he went on. ‘Takes a lot of listening to.’