Learning to Swim

by Clare Chambers

  ‘I haven’t had much else to think about these last few days.’

  ‘You want to get out more.’

  ‘I intend to. That was what today was all about, if you remember.’

  ‘Was the experiment a success?’

  ‘So far. The day isn’t over yet.’

  I looked at my watch: 11 p.m. ‘It nearly is,’ I said.

  ‘Then these last few minutes are going to be critical. It could still go either way.’

  ‘We’d better tread carefully then.’

  ‘No. Being careful would be disastrous. A careful person would pick up her coat and handbag and go home to her tidy little flat to water the pot plants and feed the cat. Recklessness is what’s called for here.’ He took a step towards me and I thought for a second he was going to kiss me, but instead he started to unbutton my shirt.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘It’s my shirt. I’m just taking what’s mine.’

  Later, as we lay in the tiny cabin, looking at the moon through a gap in Rad’s shirts, I said, ‘Did you sleep with Birdie?’ and then immediately felt ashamed. Even at a distance of nearly fourteen years I could still feel jealous of someone as dead as Mozart and Hume.

  He rolled on to his side and leaned up on one elbow to look at me. ‘No, of course I didn’t. She was your sister – I’m not completely depraved.’ There was a pause, then he added, more quietly, ‘I could have done, though,’ and I loved that little flash of male vanity almost as much as the denial itself.

  ‘I only asked because when you came that day to tell me what had happened, you said you’d banged on the pub door calling, “My girlfriend’s in the lake.”’

  ‘Did I? God, it must be a curse having your memory,’ said Rad, looking at me with a combination of bewilderment and pity. ‘I was probably just trying to get someone’s attention. It wasn’t exactly the moment to start explaining the complicated nature of our relationship.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘It’s all right.’

  ‘Do you remember what I said when you told me?’

  ‘Abigail, I’m afraid I don’t remember anything much of that conversation. It’s nothing personal – it’s just been erased.’

  ‘Good.’

  He kissed me on the forehead. ‘Have you ever been to visit her grave?’

  ‘Only two or three times. I was always afraid of bumping into Val. I’m a coward, you see. Someone visits though, because each time I went, there were already fresh flowers there.’

  ‘Val doesn’t bear a grudge. I met her again at the inquest when I was giving evidence. She said to me afterwards, “Don’t let this ruin your life.” That helped me more than all the counselling and therapy.’

  ‘You also said that Birdie already knew Half Moon Street.’

  ‘Yes, she’d been there with Val.’

  ‘Dad and Val used to meet there. He took me there once when I was little, and he told me he had happy memories of the place, but we never went there with my mother.’

  ‘Perhaps Birdie was, you know, conceived there,’ said Rad, thinking aloud, then he shut up quickly, realising that he was implicating my father in an image I might prefer not to contemplate. ‘Well, probably not,’ he said, and put his arm around me. ‘Will you be able to sleep like that?’ he asked, as I fitted myself into the crook of his elbow.

  It only seemed like seconds later that Rad was shaking me. I’d been deep in a dream about, of all things, the Last Night of the Proms, and it was a while before I could shake off the feeling that I was still swaying in the audience at the Royal Albert Hall.

  ‘Can you smell anything?’

  I sniffed. ‘Smoke.’

  He clambered over me to the door and opened it. In the fraction of a second before he slammed it again I could hear the low roar of fire.

  ‘Oh shit, the boat’s on fire,’ he said, leaping to the end of the bed and sliding the window open. ‘I forgot to turn off the gas heater and that bloody clothes drier must have fallen on top of it.’ I was hardly listening: it had only just dawned on me that the windows opened out on to the river, not the bank. Stupefied, I watched him pull on a pair of boxer shorts and a T-shirt. ‘Come on, we can’t hang around. The gas canister might explode. It’s only about a six-foot drop to the water. I’ll go first and catch you.’

  I shook my head. The rest of me was paralysed with fear. ‘I can’t jump into water,’ I said. ‘Can’t do it. Can’t we make a dash for it?’

  ‘You must be joking. It’s like a furnace out there.’ I reached for the door handle but he seized my wrist. ‘Don’t touch that door!’ he yelled, and I cringed back on the bed. ‘Look it’s only a few yards to the bank. I promise I won’t let you drown.’ A look passed between us that acknowledged more than we could ever have said about that terrible night at Half Moon Street. ‘I don’t want to leave you alone in here,’ he said then, ‘but I’ve got to go first so I’m there to catch you. Do you promise you’ll follow?’

  I nodded, and he pulled himself up to the window, which was only about eighteen inches square, and wriggled out, head first. I heard the splash, then silence for a moment and then Rad’s voice, urgent outside the window: ‘Abigail, where are you?’ I dragged on the knickers and shirt I’d been wearing earlier, my fingers fumbling with the buttons. Even at such an extremity I couldn’t face the thought of being dragged naked from the river, dead or alive. It hadn’t occurred to me until I saw Rad dive out that there was no way I would be able to get my feet over the sill first and lower myself down. I climbed on to the end of the bed and peered through the window. Rad’s pale face looked up at me from the inky water. ‘Hurry up,’ he called. I leaned out, balancing on my stomach on the metal lip of the window. As I hesitated I heard the crack of breaking glass from the main cabin, and out of the corner of my eye saw flames surging over the roof of the boat, and then I closed my eyes and launched myself into the darkness.

  The shock of the cold water closing over my head drove all the breath from my lungs and my gorge rose and I tasted death at the back of my throat, and then I felt Rad’s arms around me and cold air on my face.

  ‘I’ve got you. Don’t struggle or you’ll pull me under,’ he said, and when I felt how firmly he was holding me, and saw how close we were to the bank I stopped thrashing and let myself be rescued.

  When we were finally dripping and shivering on the grass Rad did the strangest thing. He put his arms round me and hugged me fiercely, and I realised he was crying. ‘Thank you,’ he kept saying, and for a moment I thought he was addressing the God he’d never believed in. But he wasn’t; he was talking to me. As far as he was concerned, I had saved him.

  47

  Rad accepted my offer to put him up in my flat until the boat was repaired. He brought with him a few clothes, a toothbrush and a razor in one of those climbing-frame rucksacks that students take on their travels. In fact it was the rucksack Rad took on his trip to Rome with Nicky and Frances and the infamous portaloo tent. I hated seeing it propped by the front door, trailing its straps. ‘It makes me think you’re about to go off somewhere,’ I said, and Rad laughed. Uneasily.

  Three Men in a Boat had perished in the fire. ‘You’ll always be associated in my mind with unfinished books,’ Rad said. ‘Narziss and Goldmund, Huck Finn and now this.’ He had also lost his new chair, along with the rest of the contents of the main cabin. ‘You see what happens when I start getting all greedy and acquisitive,’ was his interpretation.

  ‘It was putting that crappy old drier too close to the heater that caused the fire. Not greed.’

  ‘Which wouldn’t have happened if our clothes hadn’t got wet. Which wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t made us sprint half-way round Kew Gardens in the pissing rain.’

  He affected to find the flat shockingly luxurious, but was in fact rather glad to be able to stand upright in the shower, and lie flat out on the couch watching television. And he nearly died laughing when he found my rowing machine in the spare room. ‘The perf
ect sport for the non-swimmer,’ he said. ‘What are you practising for, exactly? Henley?’

  Sometimes when I came home in the early evening after a rehearsal or a day’s teaching I might find him in the kitchen concocting something disgusting for dinner – pork chops in mushroom soup, for example, or baked beans with mackerel – and we’d eat together at the kitchen table before I went off to my concert.

  One morning after a week or so of this I woke up in the early hours to find the bed beside me empty and Rad standing by the window looking out at the flats opposite. Before we’d fallen asleep we’d been talking about the circumstances of my expulsion from the Radley household, and we’d managed to laugh at the memory of Growth swinging by his teeth from the back of my dress while we’d ranted at one another.

  ‘If you knew how bad I felt after you’d gone,’ Rad had said. ‘It wasn’t you I was angry with, not really. It was Dad. But you can’t finish with your dad.’

  ‘You could have answered the phone or come to the door. I gave you so many chances.’

  ‘I know, I know. But I’d dug myself such a hole, I just couldn’t climb out. It was easier to stay there and suffer. I would have come round and apologised eventually, I know I would. I always meant to. But then after Birdie died it seemed unacceptable – well, wrong – even to consider my own happiness. I thought, I can’t use this as an excuse to get back to you. It would be obscene to profit from her death in any way. I chose misery instead.’

  When I woke up and saw him silhouetted against the curtains, there in my room, I had that same sense of dread that you get when the phone rings in the middle of the night: blood roaring in the ears, pulse racing. I don’t know you, I thought.

  ‘Are you all right?’ I whispered. It occurred to me that he might be sleepwalking.

  He started and then his shoulders slumped a little. ‘Yes. Fine.’ He came and sat back on the bed, not quite facing me. ‘Oh God, look.’ He risked a glance at me. ‘I haven’t been completely honest with you.’ And at these words the temperature in the room dropped to zero. My mother had been right all along.

  ‘You’ve got HIV,’ I said, pulling the sheets up around me.

  ‘No, no, it’s nothing like that. Where did you get that idea?’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘I’m … I’m going back to Senegal.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘July. Sooner if I’m up to it.’

  ‘For good?’

  ‘No, no. Just a year. Eighteen months at the most. I’ve got to get a new water-aid project running. Then I’m out of there.’

  ‘How long have you known?’

  ‘A few weeks after the accident one of the directors came to visit me in hospital and practically begged me. That’s why they’ve been so accommodating about my sick leave. I said okay the day I came out.’

  ‘You could have told me.’

  ‘I know. I should have, and I selfishly didn’t. I’d ask you to come with me, but I know you’ve got your own career …’

  ‘You could ask anyway.’

  ‘Come with me?’

  ‘I can’t. I’ve got my own career. And my parents. And a cat.’

  He gave me a crooked smile. ‘There you are.’

  ‘Can’t they send someone else?’

  He shook his head. ‘I am the someone else. The first person they sent has cracked up. Don’t try to talk me out of it. I’m definitely going.’

  I nodded slowly, trying to work out what eighteen months felt like. What was I doing eighteen months ago? ‘Why did you buy the houseboat if you knew you were leaving again?’

  ‘I’ve got to have somewhere to live when I come back. And I wanted to prove to myself that I am going to come back.’

  ‘Did you have to choose the middle of the night to tell me about this? I won’t sleep now.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I’ve been trying to pick my moment for days. I kept waiting until you were in a really good mood, but then I’d lose my nerve because I didn’t want to spoil things. But time’s running out now because someone’s bound to mention it at Mum’s party tomorrow.’

  ‘And you didn’t want me making a scene in front of the guests?’

  ‘You’re not a scene-maker.’

  ‘You’re right. I haven’t got the energy,’ I said, lying back on the pillow with my arms across my face.

  ‘If it’s any consolation I wouldn’t have taken the job if I’d known you were going to reappear like this.’

  ‘But you’d already met me once at the Barbican by then.’

  ‘You were masquerading as a married woman. That didn’t give me much grounds for optimism.’

  ‘If you’d bothered to do the smallest bit of research …’

  ‘Oh, forgive me for not applying myself better. Anyway,’ he added, ‘it seemed perfectly logical to me that you’d be married. I mean, who wouldn’t want to marry you?’

  ‘You, for a start,’ I said, rolling over on to my stomach and pretending to try and sleep.

  ‘Yes I would. I mean, I do.’

  I lay very still with my face on the pillow waiting for the punchline, the pulled plug.

  ‘We could get married before I go,’ he said. ‘If we get a move on.’

  Not even vaguely funny, I thought. Very substandard. After a minute or two Rad tapped me on the shoulder. ‘Are you awake?’

  ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘Are you interested?’

  ‘You don’t believe in marriage.’

  ‘Okay, I admit that I’ve never seen the need for it. Living together would be enough for me. But if we can’t actually live together – for a while at least – I can see that it might be reassuring to be married.’

  ‘People will think we’re mad. Getting married and then living in different countries.’

  ‘But that’s fine, because when you reached thirty you stopped worrying about other people’s opinions, remember? And I never started, so –’

  ‘This is going to offend my mother’s sense of propriety.’

  ‘Can I take that as a Yes?’ said Rad.

  48

  ‘We won’t mention anything about this today, will we?’ I said to Rad as we pulled up outside Lawrence and Lexi’s house in Chiswick. ‘It’s your mum’s celebration – we can’t hijack it.’

  Rad looked uneasy. ‘Actually I haven’t even told them you’re coming. In the excitement of nearly burning to death I forgot to mention it. In fact I don’t think they know it’s you I’m staying with. It’ll be a nice surprise,’ he said, squeezing my leg, ignoring my indignant gestures.

  It was Clarissa who opened the door. She kissed Rad and had to look twice before she recognised me. ‘Abigail!’ She gave me a scented hug, crushing the flowers I’d brought for Lexi. ‘Rad, you sly dog. Where did you find her after all this time?’

  ‘On the end of my fishing line,’ he said, leading me down the hallway.

  ‘Everyone’s out in the garden,’ said Clarissa, throwing our jackets into an armchair in the study.

  I dumped my bouquet of flowers on the kitchen table where half a dozen others, still with their wrappers and cards, were propped like tributes at the scene of an accident. Through the open window I could see Lexi, in a white trouser suit, a wide red scarf round her dark hair, holding court. I was disconcerted to see how few faces I recognised. There was Cecile, reclining on a planter’s chair in the shade. Her hair was the same shade of strawberry blonde, with that permanent pencil line of grey at the parting, and was coiled into a bun and secured with diamante pins in the shape of lips. Uncle Bill, former owner of Growth, was shuttling between groups, a bottle of champagne in one hand and a jug of orange in the other. I couldn’t see Lawrence or Mr Radley anywhere. ‘Your dad’s not here,’ I said to Rad as he handed me a glass of wine.

  ‘He’ll be late,’ said Rad. ‘If he makes it at all.’

  ‘Does he still drink?’ I asked. I’m marrying into these genes, I thought. I’m entitled to ask.

  ‘It’s much like before, rea
lly. He’s fine for months and then he’ll go out somewhere – like this – and just keep drinking until he’s made a complete fool of himself. Parties are his downfall.’

  ‘And weddings?’

  ‘I’m afraid so.’

  Rad was mobbed before we’d taken two steps into the garden. A lot of the people there wouldn’t have seen him since he came back from Senegal. Everyone knew about his motorbike accident, though his ordeal by fire and water was a new twist. I tried to shrink into the background, but Rad had me by the hand.

  ‘Mum, I’ve brought someone to see you.’

  Lexi gave a squeal of surprise and handed her glass of champagne to her neighbour the better to hug me. ‘You look wonderful,’ she said, shifting her sunglasses on to her forehead. There were deep lines around her eyes and mouth but the skin on her cheeks was smooth. ‘Oh Rad, you are naughty,’ she said, pulling the wrapping paper off our present – a new putter, which she would carry around with her for the rest of the afternoon like a fancy cane. ‘I told you not to get me anything.’ She gave a dandelion an experimental swipe. ‘It is lovely though.’ A thought struck her. ‘So Abigail is the “friend” who’s putting you up?’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Rad. ‘Remind me to give you our phone number.’

  ‘Our?’ said Lexi, raising her eyebrows, before turning back to me. ‘I’m so glad you’ve turned up again,’ she said, as if I had spent the intervening years at the back of a drawer, and then taking both my hands she looked me up and down. ‘I’ve got a couple of dresses that would fit you perfectly. With a belt,’ she conceded. ‘Don’t let me forget to give them to you. None of my other friends are slim enough.’ I liked that ‘other’. I had to smile: dressing up in Lexi’s clothes had been an important initiation rite when I was eleven – for her, nothing had changed. For a second Lexi’s eyes looked as though they might water. ‘I can’t see you standing there without thinking of my Frances,’ she said. ‘You know she’s in Brisbane?’

  ‘Rad gave me her address: we’ve written to each other, and she sent me some photos of herself and the children.’