Learning to Swim

by Clare Chambers

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But they got divorced a couple of years ago.’

  ‘Ah, well, it’s the national sport.’ And he gave a ghostly smile.

  ‘So all those times when you go off in the car, you’re not going to see them.’

  He seemed astounded by this suggestion. ‘No, of course not. I haven’t seen either of them for at least twelve years. When I go out, I just … go out.’

  How could you have done it? I wanted to say, but I could see what agony this conversation was for him, and I didn’t have the will to probe any deeper. As I left he scribbled down the number of the pay-phone in the hallway on the back of an envelope and gave it to me. ‘You can call me at any time,’ he said. ‘If it’s not me who answers, just ask for room five and one of my fellow prisoners will come and knock on the door.’

  ‘Do you know any of them?’

  ‘We nod on the stairs. Some people leave angry messages on the bathroom door about the cleaning rota. It’s rather like being in university digs again. Only without the fun.’

  33

  Birdie was welcomed into the Radley household with their usual unstudied hospitality. That strange night when I had rung her doorbell she had invited us in and we had sat up talking until three, when Rad finally fell asleep with his head on the kitchen table, and I had had to shake him awake and ply him with coffee so that he could drive us home. Since then I had only met Birdie on neutral territory – in a park, or café, or at Frances’. She had introduced me to her mother on that first occasion, but I sensed it wouldn’t be appropriate for me to make a habit of dropping in. Valerie Cromer was working at a desk in a sort of windowless broom cupboard, and swung round on her swivel chair as we knocked. Her hair was brown with streaks of grey and was scraped up into an untidy ponytail, and the skin on her face was starting to sag into the hollows, though she can’t have been more than forty.

  ‘Well, well,’ she said, when Birdie told her who I was. She looked at me over a pair of large red-rimmed glasses and nodded slowly. ‘You do look like sisters.’ And then she turned back to the pile of papers and that was it.

  ‘She’s busy,’ Birdie had explained. ‘Marking exam papers. Forty-eight pence a script – can you believe that?’ She saw injustices everywhere.

  I could tell straight away that we were going to be friends, that we wouldn’t simply meet and part and carry on our separate lives. You get a sense within minutes of meeting someone whether or not anything further can develop, and with Birdie the feeling of recognition went deeper than our appearance. She looked up to me in the same way that I used to with Frances; as someone who might prove a gateway to a more interesting existence. It was strange and pleasant to be on the receiving end of this sort of unearned admiration for once. It can’t just have been my seniority that impressed her. Although she was two years younger than me she had the confidence of someone older. Being socially disadvantaged had given her some advantages after all. She loved it at the Radleys’ because it was like home – casual, messy and informal – but with more company. And they liked her, too, because her origins were romantic, and because she had fiercely held opinions which they could mock. She had obviously been brought up in a household where political debate was common. She knew all the lingo: things were either ‘sound’ or ‘unsound’; there were lefties, but not righties, wets but not dries, scabs, trots, fascists – words which meant nothing to me but which she pronounced with great authority. My mother had always insisted it was bad manners to talk about politics – unless you were a politician, and even then she didn’t much like it. Opinions were not things to be aired, shared or modified, but things to be kept hidden away like a piece of expensive jewellery which is always shut up in a box and never worn in case it gets damaged.

  Within two weeks Birdie had converted Frances to vegetarianism, to Lexi’s great dismay. This meant Frances could no longer be made to prepare any of the family’s meals which contained meat. Mr Radley loved to argue with Birdie: nobody else would give his views the dignity of a dispute. They disagreed about practically everything.

  ‘We’re carnivores, look, look,’ he would say, baring his fangs at her. Or ‘Equality? You women can have it as far as I’m concerned. If you want to spend your lives in a pinstriped office until you’re old and exhausted and think that’s freedom, be my guest.’ Or ‘Do you honestly think it’s going to make the slightest difference to your daily life which party is in power? I’ve never voted in an election in my life.’

  ‘When’s your sister coming back?’ he asked me the day after Birdie’s first visit. ‘It’s not often I get a chance to argue with a real feminist.’

  ‘She said she couldn’t bear to waste another breath on such a hopeless old bigot,’ Frances improvised. ‘We’re feminists anyway,’ she added indignantly. Mr Radley roared with laughter.

  It was some days before Rad and I found a moment to be alone for more than a few seconds. During the drive home from Birdie’s that night we had hardly spoken.

  ‘Never a dull moment with you, Abigail,’ Rad had said, faintly, as we had set off, and I had laughed, but couldn’t find the right words to pick up the conversation. My brain felt scrambled. It was as if these two great events – Rad’s discovering me and my discovering Birdie – to which it now seemed my whole life had been leading, had by the cruel coincidence of their timing cancelled each other out. An equation – never properly understood – from school physics lessons kept replaying itself in my head: light plus light equals darkness. How could I think about my relationship with Rad when my mind was full of Birdie? What was a whole tribe of sisters to me compared with him?

  By the time we had reached my house, where I had asked to be dropped off so that I might compose my martyr’s farewell note and collect a few belongings, I had convinced myself that Rad would in any case have written off the entire episode at the party. But as we pulled up outside, just as a blue dawn was breaking, he said, without looking at me, ‘I know you’ve got more important things on your mind now, and I know you were drunk earlier, but I wasn’t, and I did mean it all,’ and I knew we would be all right.

  Relaunching our relationship under the high wattage scrutiny of the rest of the Radleys wasn’t easy, however. Flirting didn’t come naturally to Rad, and the reassuring nods and smiles we gave each other in company could have gone undetected for months. I decided that telling Frances straight away was the quickest method of spreading the news.

  Even though I had always suspected that she would disapprove, her lack of enthusiasm still took me by surprise.

  ‘You’re having me on,’ she had said, when I broached the subject.

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘But you’re totally unsuited.’

  ‘Why?’

  She gave up this line of argument. ‘What if something happens – if you split up? It will be really hard for us to be friends.’

  I laughed uneasily. ‘That’s taking family loyalty a bit far, isn’t it?’

  ‘Not really,’ she said. ‘I mean if you and Rad had a big bust-up I’d have to choose, wouldn’t I? And I’d have to choose Rad.’

  ‘The same applies to you and Nicky, then?’ I said.

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘I worry about that, too.’

  Lexi was more encouraging. ‘Oh are they? What a good idea,’ she said, when Frances passed on the information, as if convenience had been our driving motivation.

  Rad was back at the bakery again for the summer, so one morning the following week when Lexi was at the office and Mr Radley was off delivering sanitary bins to all the pubs on his round (his latest descent down the employment ladder), I turned down Frances’ suggestion of a shopping spree, and encouraged her to go without me.

  ‘Are you waiting for Rad?’ she asked. ‘Because he’ll probably be late back. Mum gave him a whole list of errands to do.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘I’m used to waiting.’

  I prowled around the house, moving from room to room in search of diversion. I
took out my cello – one of the only things I had imported from home – and played a few easy pieces in the dining room where the bare floorboards set up a nice resonance. Then I remembered Auntie Mim upstairs and put it away. I’ve never liked playing unaccompanied to an audience: the anonymity of the orchestra suits me fine. Growth was loitering at my heels, wanting to play. I took pity on him and threw his rubber bone around the sitting room while he tore back and forth to retrieve it, his eyes rolling with joy. I idly traced my name in the dust on the television screen, then realised this might look as if I was trying to make a point, so I cleaned the glass with a tea-towel. This made the rest of the room look even dirtier, but I was damned if I was going to spend all morning washing and wiping. You’d never finish a job like that – you’d go under.

  Rad was back before lunch. I watched him staggering down the road with two carrier bags of groceries in each hand and half a dozen of Lexi’s newly dry-cleaned dresses over his shoulder. I waved as he came down the path, but before he saw me he was waylaid by Fish, who was digging up his driveway, and it was ten minutes before he could extricate himself.

  ‘Moron,’ he said, kicking the front door shut behind him, a remark I took to refer to Fish, not me. ‘Oh, hello.’ He brushed his lips against mine as he passed me on the way to the kitchen with the shopping, which he started to unpack. After emptying one bag he stopped, taking in the unusual quietness of the house. ‘Are we the only ones in?’ he asked, tossing boxes of set meals into the freezer.

  ‘Apart from Auntie Mim.’

  His pace increased fractionally. ‘Right, that’s done. I’m going to get changed.’ He patted his T-shirt, sending up a puff of flour. ‘Are you coming up?’ he added, a shade too nonchalantly.

  ‘Erm … okay,’ I said, aware of the significance of breaching the threshold of his bedroom, and followed him upstairs with a sense of impending calamity.

  Rad had already dragged the old T-shirt over his head by the time he reached the top landing. It was dropped on a pile of laundry just inside his doorway. The room’s only chair was occupied by a stack of open books and pages of handwritten notes – an essay in progress – so I perched upright on the edge of the bed while Rad stood in front of his wardrobe contemplating his three shirts as though overwhelmed by the breadth of the choice before him.

  What if he takes his trousers off? was my main thought. Am I supposed to watch or not?

  But he just pulled one of the shirts from a hanger and sat down next to me on the bed, buttoning it up.

  ‘Are you all right?’ he said at last, taking my hand.

  ‘Yes, of course,’ I said.

  ‘You haven’t been avoiding me, have you?’

  ‘No. It’s just there’s never a moment …’

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘There’s no privacy in this place.’

  There was a silence. In all my daydreams and fantasies about Rad, rehearsed and refined over many years, things had never progressed beyond that initial moment of admission, that first kiss, and now I had the strange and unnerving feeling of being on stage with no script. What was supposed to happen next? How were we meant to negotiate that tricky terrain between drunken euphoria and normal, unthinking, devoted coupledom?

  ‘If this was a film it would be over by now,’ I said. ‘It would have ended in the summer-house with the flames going up in the background.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  Sometimes when I was following a line of thought in my head I wasn’t sure which bits I’d actually said out loud. ‘Sorry. I was just thinking I wish we were back at the party. It was easier to talk there, for some reason. Perhaps it was because it was dark.’

  ‘Well, we can close the curtains if you like,’ said Rad, mistaking my meaning. He didn’t wait for a reply but drew them anyway. When he sat down again he was that much closer to me. In the gloom I could see specks of flour, white on his black eyelashes.

  Just how deaf was Auntie Mim? I wondered, thinking of the party wall.

  There was a rattle from the letter-box. ‘Coo-ee,’ called a voice. ‘Anyone in?’

  Growth, roused from sleep, started barking irritably. Rad put a finger over my lips. ‘We’re not here,’ he whispered, peering through a chink in the curtain. ‘It’s Clarissa.’

  A key grated in the lock, and then we heard the front door opening. ‘Helloo! Lexi!’

  ‘Oh, typical Mum. Half of London must have a key to this bloody house.’ He stood up, admitting defeat. ‘Hello,’ he called over the banisters.

  Clarissa was standing in the hallway scribbling a message on the telephone pad. She jumped at his voice. ‘Oh, Rad, you startled me. I thought there was no one in. Hello Abigail, are you here too?’ she added, as I appeared at Rad’s elbow. ‘You weren’t in bed, were you?’

  ‘No, we were on it,’ said Rad. We made our way downstairs.

  ‘Where’s your mum?’

  ‘At work, isn’t she?’

  ‘She’s supposed to be having the day off so we can go to the Flower Show. She was meant to be picking me up an hour ago.’

  ‘She must have forgotten.’

  ‘Has she got something on her mind?’ asked Clarissa. ‘This is the second time she’s stood me up in a fortnight.’

  ‘Perhaps she’s worried about Frances’ A-level results?’ I suggested. Rad and Clarissa seemed to find this idea highly diverting.

  ‘I was going to borrow some of her clothes anyway, so I might as well take them while I’m here.’ She thumbed through the dry-cleaning which was hanging from the picture rail. ‘These will do,’ she said. ‘Carry on,’ were her last words as she strode down the drive, trailing yards of ballooning polythene.

  Within minutes of her departure Frances was back from the shops with a new pair of jeans and a bag of apple doughnuts, and the moment for carrying on with anything was, to my great disappointment and relief, past.

  34

  ‘Perhaps she’s going through the change of life,’ said Birdie, putting down her copy of To the Lighthouse. She was sitting in the Radleys’ front room, sideways across an armchair, legs dangling.

  Her habit of coming to visit us and spending the entire time buried in a book struck Frances as bizarre and troubling. ‘Why bother to trek all the way over from Wimbledon just to sit and read? She could do that at home.’ But Birdie seemed content merely to be with us and had no need for any additional entertainment. I found this reassuring. It was natural, unforced; it was what a sister would do. (It only occurred to me later that it might not have been us she came to see.) I was cross-legged on the floor in front of her chair, restringing a set of Lexi’s amber beads. Frances was customising her new jeans by cutting slits in the knees and seat and lining the holes with flesh-coloured material. Rad was asleep on the couch.

  ‘Does it make you forgetful then?’ asked Frances. ‘I thought you just got hot and sweaty.’

  ‘No. Some women go totally barking.’

  The object of their concern was Lexi. She had just poked her head around the door to tell us she was off to play golf with Clarissa, and we had heard her clattering around in the cupboard under the stairs where she kept her clubs. A moment later she had emerged with the hoover over her shoulder, and before any of us could intercept her, had slung it in the boot of the car and driven off.

  ‘She might be worried about Auntie Mim.’ It was generally agreed that Auntie Mim was ailing: the range of her appetite had contracted still further; she had had nothing but weak tea and aspirin for days now.

  ‘Mum doesn’t believe in worrying.’

  ‘Neither do I,’ said Birdie. ‘If you’ve got a problem, do something about it. If there’s nothing you can do, worrying won’t help.’

  Here at last was evidence of some genetic variation: I worried about things like an outbreak of Legionnaire’s disease in a country I had never visited. If there was a report on the television about a small asteroid on a collision course for Earth, my mind would immediately turn on the likelihood of it landing on
me. When it came to disasters I always felt like an actuarial phenomenon waiting to happen; if I read a newspaper I tended to identify only with the very unlucky – the person who choked to death on a peanut rather than the pools winner.

  ‘It must be overwork,’ said Frances.

  ‘Who’s overworked?’ asked Mr Radley, strolling in. ‘I certainly am.’ He flung himself down on the chaise longue and began clicking through the TV channels. Rad stirred as the sound erupted from the set, but his eyes remained closed. ‘This picture seems bright,’ he said. ‘Have you been fiddling with the controls, Frances?’ She said she hadn’t. I kept my head down. ‘Funny,’ he mused. ‘Must be a power surge.’ He watched Frances attacking her new jeans with the kitchen scissors. ‘You know in more primitive times, Frances, women used to sit around mending old clothes, rather than vandalising new ones.’ Frances stuck two fingers through the rip in the seat of her jeans and waggled them at him.

  ‘Now you two,’ he went on, ignoring her, ‘make such a marvellous picture, I’m inclined to ask you to sit for me.’ We were flattered in spite of ourselves.

  ‘What, right here?’ said Birdie.

  ‘No, no, upstairs, where the light’s better. You wouldn’t mind just sitting still for an hour or so every afternoon? You’ve nothing better to do, have you?’

  ‘Suits me,’ said Birdie. ‘I can get some reading done.’

  ‘Can’t I read as well?’ I protested.

  ‘No – I want you holding those beads,’ said Mr Radley.

  ‘Can I wear a Walkman?’

  He raised his eyes to heaven. ‘I might let you read once I’ve done your hands,’ he conceded.

  ‘Can I buy the painting when it’s finished?’ Birdie pleaded. She wasn’t yet familiar with his work. ‘Unless Abigail wants it too.’