Learning to Swim

by Clare Chambers

  ‘You’ll have to toss for it,’ said Frances. ‘Loser gets to keep the painting.’

  A thought struck Birdie. ‘Do we have to take our clothes off?’

  ‘No, no.’ Mr Radley laughed indulgently. ‘Not unless you want to.’

  ‘We don’t,’ I said.

  ‘It wouldn’t bother me, actually,’ said Birdie. ‘There’s nothing shameful about nudity.’

  ‘Have you been talking to Mum?’ asked Frances.

  ‘Artists are just like doctors,’ Birdie went on. ‘I mean, you wouldn’t think twice about stripping off in front of your GP.’

  ‘You might if he had no qualifications and no talent,’ said Rad from the couch, without otherwise moving.

  Mr Radley affected to be convulsed with mirth. ‘I knew he wasn’t really asleep,’ he said. ‘My son is easily provoked,’ he explained to Birdie in a loud whisper.

  ‘I was asleep until you thoughtfully put the TV on.’

  Mr Radley ignored this. ‘Anyway, Rad, though I admit you might have certain territorial rights over Abigail, I don’t see why you should extend the franchise to her sister.’

  Rad’s response to this sort of joke, which he hated, tended to be a sudden attack of pomposity. ‘I don’t claim any rights over Abigail,’ he said. ‘Or anyone else. It was just friendly advice.’

  His father gave an infuriating smirk, glad to have succeeded in winding Rad up.

  Birdie, who was somewhat in awe of Rad, decided that, on reflection, Art would be just as well served by her remaining clothed.

  Mr Radley was an exacting portraitist. He seemed very rapidly to forget that it was at his request that we were there in his studio at all, and came instead to view the enterprise as a huge and tiresome favour on his part. Birdie was all right – she was rattling through Virginia Woolf. I was stuck on the floorboards with those damn beads. When I requested music to relieve the tedium Mr Radley offered me Gregorian Chant or nothing, and he tutted when I got cramp and had to hobble around the room.

  At first Birdie and I couldn’t chat without turning round or making each other laugh and twitch out of position, but gradually we got used to talking without being allowed to move or make eye contact, and after a while we were able to ignore Mr Radley’s sighs and groans and the squeak of charcoal on canvas, and carry on as if there was no one else there. Our conversation always had a way of returning to the same subject – Us.

  ‘Birdie isn’t your real name, is it?’

  ‘No. It’s Elizabeth. Elizabeth Katherine Cromer. But when I was born I was premature, and Mum said I had this thin dark hair on my head like wet feathers, and tiny chicken legs, and I just looked like a baby bird that’s been pushed out of its nest. No one’s ever called me anything but Birdie.’

  ‘If you’d always known about me, didn’t you ever feel like tracking me down and confronting me?’ I asked her one afternoon.

  ‘I wasn’t allowed,’ she said. ‘Mum told me you didn’t know anything about us. Anyway when I was younger I used to really hate you.’

  ‘Oh.’ I didn’t like the idea of being hated, even in absentia and at a distance of several years.

  ‘For some reason I imagined you were really rich and living in some flash house, with a pony and everything, while Mum and I were stuck in a flat, without any central heating, being poor.’

  ‘We haven’t got central heating either,’ I said, suddenly proud of a fact that had annoyed me for years.

  ‘I did come to your house once – about three years ago. I knew Mum would have your address somewhere, and I got the train and the bus and got totally lost and walked miles, but I found it eventually. I spied on the house from the end of the road for about ten minutes. Then I started to get a bit brave and I came right up to the house. I saw your dad’ (‘your dad’, I noticed, not ‘Dad’) ‘through the window, and then you came out the front door and I ran for it. There’s nowhere to hide in your road. I was quite relieved to find that you weren’t rich or anything. Actually I remember you were wearing a really bad ra-ra skirt.’ (Mr Radley gave a snort of laughter at this point.) ‘It made me feel a lot better.’

  ‘I’ve still got it somewhere,’ I said, vowing then and there to chuck it out at the first opportunity.

  It was during one of these conversations that various odd coincidences came to light. Like me, Birdie had been bullied at school; she had never had her hair cut short; she couldn’t swim, and she played a musical instrument – the violin. When we compared notes it emerged that our respective orchestras had attended the same music festival the previous summer. We had perhaps come within a bow’s length of discovering each other then.

  On the strength of this shared interest Birdie suggested we went busking. ‘Have you ever done that?’ she asked.

  I said I hadn’t. Somehow the cello didn’t strike me as having the sort of sound that lent itself to tube stations or subways. A concert hall, or the garden of an Oxford college, yes.

  ‘Let’s do it. You can make good money,’ she insisted. ‘I could round up another violinist and a viola player, no trouble, and we could do some chamber music one day.’

  ‘Chamber music?’ said Frances, a little dejectedly, when told of the plan. ‘That means no vocals, I suppose.’ She quite fancied herself as a gravel-voiced club singer, and would have liked nothing better than to belt out ‘Hey Big Spender’ at embarrassed commuters.

  ‘Where are you going to do it?’ Rad wanted to know. ‘You’ll have to be careful you don’t trespass on someone else’s patch.’

  ‘There’s that blind accordionist who does the stretch by the shopping centre car-park,’ Frances agreed. ‘He looks like he could turn nasty.’ I had a sudden image of running battles between rival gangs of musicians.

  ‘Don’t let them put you off,’ said Birdie. ‘It’ll be fun. We’ll treat you to a pizza with our earnings,’ she promised them.

  Brother and sister looked at each other. ‘We’ll eat beforehand just in case,’ said Frances.

  In the event Frances couldn’t resist coming along. We had selected a pitch in a complex of subways in the town centre where they converged at an open-air intersection whose chief feature was an octagonal patch of dead grass. The chosen site had the benefit of interesting acoustics without being too oppressively subterranean. It smelled like a urinal nevertheless. We installed ourselves – instruments, music stands, a chair for me – rather self consciously between two daubs of graffiti: FREE NELSON MANDELA and, further along, TRACIE IS A FAT SLAG.

  Birdie had brought along some string duet arrangements – nothing too technically demanding: we were there to beguile pedestrians, not to extend ourselves, after all. The other half of the promised quartet had, predictably, cried off at the last minute. I wondered whether Birdie had invented them. As she propped her empty violin case at our feet and dropped in some loose change a few passers-by, seeing our preparations, quickened their pace.

  Frances, finding herself under-employed, left us to play our first pieces and made a quick tour of the other tunnels and stairways to check how far the music carried. ‘It sounds lovely,’ she said when she reappeared, adding tactlessly, ‘It must be the echo.’

  After a while Birdie and I began to relax. We started concentrating less on our playing and more on trying to guess which of the people who passed would be likely contributors to our pizza fund. A few general principles soon emerged. People who speeded up, kept their eyes fixed straight ahead or stared down at their feet were no-hopers, as were other teenagers, old ladies with shopping-bags-on-wheels and young mothers with pushchairs. Perhaps it was something to do with having their hands full. The softest targets were men in suits, particularly those travelling in packs: if one gave they all bowed to the pressure.

  ‘Do you think men are more generous than women?’ I asked Birdie, when our statistical sample seemed to have reached significant proportions.

  ‘No. They just have more money,’ was her reply.

  Bored with her passive role, Frances
had taken to performing circuits of the subway system in the guise of a passer-by, ostentatiously tossing coins into the violin case as an encouragement to others, and then retrieving the money when no one was around. ‘Beautiful isn’t it?’ we could hear her saying to someone as they made their way down the steps towards us.

  ‘Very,’ said her companion, an expensively dressed woman, about my mother’s age, keeping a firm grip on her handbag.

  ‘Tightwad,’ muttered Frances, as the woman tacked off smartly across the dead grass before she came within range of our begging bowl. ‘I’m going to the café to get a drink; I’m parched,’ she added, helping herself to a handful of change. ‘Do you want anything?’ Birdie asked for a Coke.

  On Frances’ return, some while later, traces of crumbs down the front of her top confirmed that she had been gorging on chocolate cake. She had forgotten the Coke of course. She looked approvingly at the layer of silver in the bottom of the violin case. ‘We’re doing well,’ she said.

  ‘We?’ said Birdie and I, simultaneously laying down our bows in protest. The subway was momentarily deserted so we allowed ourselves a break.

  ‘I’m keeping your spirits up, aren’t I?’ said Frances. There was a sound of footsteps in the distance. ‘Quick, get playing,’ she commanded. I was hoping it might be Rad, who had promised to come along and spectate if he finished his essay in time. But the figure who came round the corner was a rather less agreeable proposition. He was about Rad’s age, possibly older, with a thin white face topped by a small woolly hat. His T-shirt and jeans looked as though they hadn’t parted company from his body in several months, and he was swaying slightly and muttering, slapping the subway wall occasionally with one hand, to steady himself perhaps, or because there was nothing else available to hit.

  He slowed down when he saw us – unlike most people – and gave a sort of lurch in our direction. I must confess that my bowing action became less than fluid at this point, but beside me Birdie played on without wavering. As he drew level he stopped, and for an insane moment I thought he was going to give us some money, but instead he gave a horrible leering smile and then leaned forwards and spat a gobbet of bilious green slime on to ground about two inches from Birdie’s right shoe. Our music came to a skidding halt, and the three of us stared in amazement at his departing back.

  ‘Another satisfied customer,’ said Birdie, and began to giggle. We were still breaking into laughter over it five minutes later as we packed up, when Rad arrived.

  ‘Oh no,’ he said, as I flipped home the catches on my cello case. ‘I’m not too late, am I?’

  I could tell Birdie would have been prepared to unload everything again just to oblige him, but Frances had been bored for some time by now, and I had had my fill of the subway. ‘Twelve pounds,’ said Birdie, jangling a plastic bag of the afternoon’s takings in his face.

  ‘Not bad,’ he admitted. ‘But at least in the bakery you get free bread – and all the flour you can inhale.’

  ‘Ah, but you don’t have the fun of being spat at by mad dossers,’ said Birdie, and related the incident, with many interruptions and embellishments from Frances.

  The plan was to go back to Balmoral Road to drop off our instruments and wait for Nicky, and then send out for a pizza – perhaps two, depending how far the funds stretched. I had skipped lunch and was beginning to feel slightly giddy with pleasure at the thought of food. When we reached the railway station Rad was in the middle of explaining the breakthrough he had just had in his essay on Kant, and I was trying to remember the four toppings on a Quattro Stagioni and only half-listening, when Frances suddenly dug me in the ribs and said ‘Aha, there’s Gobber.’ Sitting against the wall near the taxi rank on a greyish sleeping bag was our erstwhile critic, in his filthy jeans and woolly cap. It was still a rare sight to see a young person begging openly – especially in the suburbs – and I was shocked at the abject way he kept his head down and his hand out, all the while muttering the refrain ‘Spare some change please’. Nevertheless revenge is a primitive need, and the moment I saw him I could feel my mouth start to fill with saliva.

  ‘That’s the bloke who spat at us,’ said Frances to Rad. ‘Go and belt him.’

  ‘Do you mind if I don’t?’ said Rad.

  Birdie, who hadn’t given any sign of recognition so far, indeed seemed to have drifted off into a reverie of her own, all of a sudden came to and said, ‘Allow me. You don’t mind, do you?’ she added, as the three of us hung back wondering with some unease what form this confrontation was going to take, and before any of us could stop her she had crossed the road and dropped the plastic bag containing our entire afternoon’s earnings at his feet.

  It would be pleasing to relate that the recipient of this majestic act of charity showed some degree of gratitude or mortification, but he merely gave Birdie a blank stare and pulled the bag a little closer towards him.

  ‘Do you think I did the right thing?’ said Birdie, taking in our dismayed expressions.

  ‘Oh brilliant,’ said Frances bitterly. ‘There goes our dinner.’

  ‘I wasn’t that hungry anyway,’ said Rad, seeing Birdie blush at the rebuke.

  Artichokes. That was the fourth thing, I remembered.

  With the continual traffic of visitors at the Radleys – Birdie, Lawrence, Clarissa, Nicky – my elevation to artist’s model, and Rad’s anti-social working hours, the opportunities for Rad and me to be together were scarce. He started his shift at the bakery at 3 a.m. so late nights were out of the question. He resented wasting daylight hours on sleep, and came to bemoan the amount of time I spent stringing beads on the studio floor. ‘Dad gets to see more of you than I do,’ he complained one afternoon when Mr Radley had extended one of our sessions because things were going well. ‘I think he’s doing it on purpose.’ I laughed, faintly. I knew what his impatience was all about.

  35

  On the day Auntie Mim was finally admitted to hospital, Rad and I made a return visit to Half Moon Street, alone. Mr Radley had cancelled our sitting in order to take her in himself and see her safely installed. He had packed her bag with clean night-clothes and her ivory-backed hairbrush and the Agatha Christie Omnibus which was the only book I’d ever seen her reading.

  Rad and I, meanwhile, had packed his car with the dog-blanket from the chaise longue, and a picnic consisting of sandwiches made with the end of a jar of peanut butter, a couple of softish apples, and the remains of the day before’s treacle tart. Rad didn’t take a book – a fact which struck me as significant. As I was washing the apples – one of which had an ominous curve of puncture marks, as though a small dog had picked it up in his teeth and dropped it – Rad came into the kitchen carrying two towels. ‘Shall we take swimming gear?’

  ‘It says No Swimming,’ I reminded him.

  ‘If there’s no one there …’

  ‘There are always people there.’

  ‘There might not be. It’s not that sunny.’

  ‘If it’s cold enough to put people off going, it’ll be too cold to swim,’ I pointed out.

  ‘Shall we take them just in case?’

  ‘Rad, you know I can’t swim.’

  ‘I’ll teach you.’

  ‘I don’t want to learn.’

  ‘You must do.’

  ‘I don’t.’

  Rad sighed, and returned the towels to the airing cupboard. We didn’t speak much on the journey. There was an awkwardness between us that was something to do with my refusal to swim, and was about something different too. The last time we had been to Half Moon Street had been a year ago, with Frances and Nicky. Rad had bought us all lunch, we had sat on the grass, Narziss and Goldmund had ended up in the water, we had eaten ice cream on the way home, Rad and I were just friends: we were all happy. Today I was nervous. If I said or did the wrong thing, would I be cast off?

  Rad was fiddling with the radio, which seemed to offer nothing but hiss and crackle and the odd burst of German. Occasionally when he spun the tuning dial
it would let out a high-pitched whistle and cut out altogether. I was then called upon to smack the top of the dashboard with the A–Z to try and revive it.

  ‘I hope Auntie Mim gets better quickly,’ I said at one point. ‘She needs feeding up – but I don’t suppose they have potatoes and sprouts on the menu every day.’ She had looked terrible being helped into the car by Mr Radley. I’d hardly ever seen her on the move before – she had always been sitting in her armchair – and it struck me how tiny she was, and how brittle. If she had fallen on the driveway she would surely have broken into a thousand pieces. My granny’s bones were like steel: she could crack a paving stone with one blow from her hip. Auntie Mim had given us a little wave from the front seat, tiny clawed fingers trembling at the window.

  ‘Feeding up?’ Rad laughed at me. ‘You’re such an optimist. ‘She’ll never come out of hospital.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘They don’t try and cure people her age.’

  ‘But they have to try and preserve life, don’t they?’

  ‘Oh, they’ll stick her on a drip and do “tests”, but … She knows she’s not coming back. I went into her room to see if she wanted anything carrying down, and she’d packed all her stuff up in boxes, ready for Mum to take to Oxfam.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It’s true.’

  She put her affairs in order, I thought with a shudder. We hit a pot-hole in the road and the radio came back on suddenly and loudly. ‘Our lips shouldn’t touch, move over darling,’ sang Doris Day. The sun was shining, love songs were playing on the radio, children were out on their bikes, and Auntie Mim was packing up and moving into Death’s waiting room. I thought of that bony hand at the window.

  ‘She’s a lesbian. Did you know that?’ I said.

  ‘Doris Day?’

  ‘Auntie Mim.’

  ‘Never. That must be one of Dad’s tall stories.’

  ‘Honest. She sort of confided in me one day. She showed me this photo of a woman – a black and white, really ancient-looking, must’ve been taken in the 1920s or something, and said it was the love of her life.’