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.

Another occasion provoked my parents’ cordial version of a row. It was a sunny Sunday in May and I had returned from Frances’ early to do our homework. It was safer to do both than to let Frances copy since she would either reproduce mine in every detail and get us both into trouble, or deliberately introduce such ridiculous errors in an attempt to personalise her version that it rather defeated the object of my efforts. I had just knocked off the life-cycle of the liverwort and had come downstairs for a tea-break. In the sitting room mother was ironing the newly washed net curtains and father was standing at the bare windows looking up the road.

‘The room looks rather nice without net curtains,’ he remarked, absently. ‘You can see out.’

‘And people can see in,’ said mother, ironing with slightly more vigour.

‘People don’t often come down this road,’ father pointed out. ‘It’s not as if we’ve got anyone opposite, come to that.’ As the house at the end of the lollipop, we faced the green and the length of the road.

‘It would be like living in a goldfish bowl,’ said mother, laying the first curtain at full length on the couch and setting to work on the next. ‘Anyone passing would be able to see every speck on the wall.’ As if there were any specks!

‘It would be different on a main road,’ father conceded.

‘The Radleys live on a main road and they don’t have net curtains,’ I put in.

‘Well, net curtains take a lot of looking after,’ said mother pointedly. She seemed to have some idea, obviously picked up from an unguarded remark of mine, that the Radleys lived in squalor – an unfair impression: Frances and I often did the housework.

‘They make you feel shut in somehow,’ said father, as mother started threading the curtains back on to their vulcanised rail.

‘Well, I’ve just spent the day cleaning them,’ said mother, in a voice that was both mild and utterly inflexible, ‘so back they go.’ And climbing from the couch to the window sill with the yards of net fanning out behind her she hooked them back into position like an army raising its banner.

The one-sidedness of my arrangement with Frances offended my mother’s sense of propriety. ‘Why don’t you ever bring her here?’ she asked one Saturday as I was stuffing some clothes into an overnight bag. ‘They can’t keep feeding you every week.’ I didn’t tell her that more often than not we fed ourselves – and them, for that matter. Nor could I explain the real reason why we always went to Frances’ place. It was simply more fun there. Nothing happened at our house, whereas at the Radleys’ there was always something going on; someone arriving or departing with fresh adventures or disasters to relate.

Growth and Auntie Mim were the only members of the household who were guaranteed to be present. We would sometimes find the latter in the kitchen tending a foaming green pan of sprouts. She cooked them with so much bicarbonate of soda, Lexi said, that nutritionally they had no value whatever and it was a miracle that Auntie hadn’t got scurvy by now. Rad was often out on Saturdays, playing rugby, or swimming, or competing in chess tournaments. He didn’t appear to have a girlfriend, or any interest in acquiring one, a source of great mirth to Frances, who loved to tease him. ‘There’s only one girl at Rad’s school,’ she would say. ‘And she only comes over for woodwork lessons. What’s she like, Rad?’

‘Fat, ugly and stupid,’ Rad would reply, sending Frances into peals of delighted laughter.

When at home Rad tended to stay in his room. The sound of rustling from the larder might alert us that he was on the prowl and on the pretext of going to the loo I would try to engineer a meeting on the stairs so that I might be the recipient of a terse ‘Hello’, which would form the substance of tormented dreams for nights to come. He never showed the slightest interest in me, of course. I didn’t dare tell Frances of my infatuation as she would certainly have told Rad, probably in my presence, a humiliation for which suicide would have been the only remedy.

Mr Radley, because of his odd hours of work, was usually asleep for part of the day and silence in the vicinity of his bedroom had to be observed. I had by now learnt from Frances that he had once had a proper career in the Civil Service but for some years now had survived on a series of odd jobs of brief duration, the latest of which was lobby attendant at a London hotel. When he was up and about he frequently came into Frances’ room to ask her some trifling question, such as the whereabouts of a particular item of food that had vanished from the fridge, and ended up staying for hours telling us about work or cross-examining us about school. He loved us to ask him questions and would never be short of an opinion, but somehow I didn’t have great confidence in his pronouncements. When my father explained something you had the sense of drinking from the top of a deep well, whereas with Mr Radley you couldn’t help feeling that what you got was all there was – and some more – and if you persisted any further he’d be left thoroughly parched. I couldn’t work him out: he seemed to like the company of young people, and yet according to him they were responsible for all the ills of the world. ‘Youth is wasted on the young’ he was fond of saying, especially when he caught us idling in front of the television, or complaining we were bored. It was he who invented a nickname for me – Blush – which caught on as only the cruellest or most pertinent can.

Lexi might spend the day enthroned in the living room entertaining a succession of callers. Clarissa or other golfing friends might turn up, followed by Lawrence, a good-looking man who was introduced as Lexi’s boyfriend. Everyone not a blood relation was hailed by Lexi as a ‘boyfriend’ or ‘girlfriend’, so this was no cause for suspicion. Lawrence also seemed to be on the best of terms with Mr Radley, a further reassurance. On non-visiting days a brief but frenzied onslaught would be made on the housework. Lexi would tear through the house like a tornado, picking up discarded belongings and hurling them back into the owner’s bedroom, while Frances followed behind with the hoover, which made a terrific din on the uncarpeted floors. Wooden furniture would get a quick smear with a waxy duster, and anything above eye-level would be left to fester. In the evening Lexi would dress up, curl her hair in heated rollers and float out to dinner on a cloud of musky perfume. Occasionally she would play host herself and Frances and I would be paid to act as waitresses, serving food and drinks and washing up. Mr Radley, because of his anti-social working hours, was rarely of the party.

After I had been to the house a few times I ventured to enquire about the mysterious third door on the top landing.

‘It’s Dad’s studio. He goes up there to do painting and stuff now and then.’

‘What – oil painting?’

‘Yes, you know, portraits and stuff.’

‘You mean he’s an Artist,’ I said, impressed. I must have known he was something more than an overgrown bell-boy. ‘Why didn’t you tell me before?’

‘Well, he’s not really an artist,’ she said. ‘It’s just a hobby. Some of his stuff’s a bit weird. Do you want a look?’

The door shuddered open on contact with Frances’ shoulder to release a dry smell of wood and turpentine. The floor was uncarpeted and marked with blobs of dried paint. Along one side of the room was a wooden bench cluttered with jars of brushes and palette knives, charcoal sticks, buckled tubes of paint and rosettes of crumpled rags. In the light of the window stood an easel and a blank canvas, and in the middle of the room was a low armchair covered with a grubby white sheet. Against one wall some canvases were leaning face down. Frances started to look through them. I peered over her shoulder. They were all rather blotchy nudes: one was obviously meant to be Lexi, but the others were different people, men and women, some old people, in outlandish colours.

‘A bit blobby, aren’t they,’ said Frances, critically. ‘He must get through loads of paint.’

‘Does he just make them up, or what?’ I couldn’t imagine a troupe of naked people processing through the attic room just to be rendered in tones of orange and green.

‘No, you twit, he goes to life-drawing classes. All these people like Dad sit around and they take it in turns to take their clothes off.’

‘No!’

‘I think that’s what happens. Where else would you get the people from?’

‘How embarrassing! Why can’t they just draw people with clothes on?’ I said. ‘It’s not as if he uses flesh-coloured paint anyway.’

‘Artists always paint people in the nude. Perhaps it’s more difficult, or easier or something,’ said Frances. ‘Anyway,’ she added in warning tones, ‘if he ever offers to paint you, you’ll know what to say.’

‘Did your dad go to Art College, then?’ I asked, as we made our way downstairs.

‘No,’ said Mr Radley, emerging from behind his bedroom door, making me jump. ‘I wasn’t clever enough to go to College,’ he said in a mock-apologetic voice that left me in no doubt that on the contrary he considered himself far too clever.