17

When I was fourteen I discovered where it was that my father went on his many unexplained absences from home. In a curious way the truth was stranger than my most lurid imaginings. For some time Frances had been entertaining the fantasy that he was a Russian spy.

‘He was at Cambridge, wasn’t he?’ went her reasoning. ‘And Latin is a useful skill for code-breakers.’

‘And Latin teachers,’ I said.

She ignored me. ‘And he’s always going off – he’s probably meeting the head of the KGB in a park to pass on secrets.’

‘My father’s not a communist. He votes Conservative,’ I protested.

‘I don’t suppose the communists field a candidate in northwest Kent,’ said Rad, who was playing clock patience on the floor and listening to our discussion. Since Nicky’s introduction to the household Rad seemed to have grown more sociable. Although he didn’t exactly join in Frances’ and my activities, he was out of his bedroom more often and could manage to sustain a conversation – even a frivolous one – if required.

‘You don’t know who he votes for once he’s in that little booth,’ said Frances. ‘It’s a perfect front – he’s such a pillar of respectability not even his own daughter would suspect him.’

‘If you don’t mind my saying so, your dad’s just as likely to be a spy as mine. I mean, he has all day to hang around meeting people in parks or whatever they do.’ Her insinuations were beginning to rankle.

She looked at me scornfully. ‘Dad? Don’t be stupid. No one would trust him with a secret for five minutes.’ There was a silence as I acknowledged the truth of this. ‘Why don’t you follow him on your bike one day?’ she went on.

‘Oh no, I couldn’t do that. What if I caught him doing something really bad – like going to a brothel?’ I wasn’t quite sure how I would recognise a brothel, unless it had a neon sign outside advertising itself. ‘And what if he saw me seeing him?’

Frances conceded this would be difficult. As it turned out I didn’t need to make any elaborate plans to catch my father in the practice of his illicit hobby.

It was a summer’s evening in June, and Frances and I were on our way to a party. We had spent the afternoon trying on and discarding various costumes from her and Lexi’s wardrobes. I was already kitted out in a tight black pencil skirt which my mother, with some misgivings, had agreed to make. I had only managed to save it from being a respectable piece of office clothing that a librarian might safely wear by secretly moving the pins inwards after a fitting. At Frances’ suggestion I had stuffed my bra with tissues, and was now sporting a pair of hard and rather lumpy breasts under my T-shirt. Frances, who was a great frequenter of jumble sales, had settled on what was obviously a man’s striped night-shirt, frayed at the collar, and was wearing it half open and belted over a low-necked vest. She didn’t need any stuffing. I was practising walking in a pair of Lexi’s stilettos, which were a size too large and had to have still more tissues packed into the toes to give me a chance of keeping them on. I was beginning to feel like a rag doll.

‘Hmm. I think your problem is the split in your skirt doesn’t go up far enough,’ said Frances as I teetered past, knees locked together, eyes fixed on my feet. Years of trying on Lexi’s shoes had made her a confident practitioner of the art of running for buses in high heels. ‘Do you want me to alter it for you?’

‘Well …’ I hesitated. My mother’s main objection to the fashion had been that a split made the wearer look cheap. And I’d never put Frances down as much of a seamstress. Before I had had time to decline the offer, she had seized the back of my skirt and pulled the seam apart with a horrible rending sound.

‘There you are,’ she said, pleased to be of help.

‘Oh my God,’ I wailed, craning round to inspect the damage. ‘What have you done? You can almost see my knickers.’

‘Not if you don’t lean forward too much.’ She had already moved on and was rummaging in a shoebox full of Lexi’s discarded make-up. I watched her apply scarlet polish to her bitten nails. ‘I don’t know why I’m making so much effort,’ she said, waving one hand in the air to dry, ‘there won’t be anyone decent there anyway.’ By which she meant Nicky.

‘No,’ I agreed. The party was being given by a girl at school, and in recognition of the shortage of available males we had all been instructed to ‘bring a boy’. (When my mother first saw the invitation she thought it said ‘bring and buy’ and offered me some home-made marmalade to take.) Naturally we were unable to oblige as we didn’t know any co-operative boys. There was no possibility of asking Rad along. He was now in the sixth form and would have considered the event ‘girlie’ and quite beneath him. He was also too busy rehearsing a school production of Much Ado About Nothing, in which he was taking the part of Benedick. Only that day I had tested him on his lines and experienced the thrill of hearing him say to me without any embarrassment that he would live in my heart, die in my lap and be buried in my eyes. I had read Twelfth Night at school and was familiar with Shakespearean innuendo. It was only after some circumlocution and careful questioning that I learnt to my great relief that Beatrice was to be played by a reedy fourth year called Toby Arlington.

The party invitation had also required us to bring a bottle. Just before we left, Frances remembered this detail and went to check the fridge. ‘We’re in luck,’ she cried, emerging from the kitchen holding a bottle of slimline tonic, two-thirds full. ‘I didn’t think there’d be anything.’

‘You’re not going out without coats, are you?’ Lexi said, emerging from the sitting room to make her farewells. ‘It’s not all that warm, you know.’

We shook our heads in horror. ‘Oh no, Mum, a coat wouldn’t go with this at all,’ said Frances. ‘We’ll be fine. It’s bus most of the way.’ I nodded my agreement. In truth I was already a little chilly, especially around the neck as Frances had put my hair up, but my navy school coat was unthinkable; I’d have been a laughing stock.

‘And how are you getting home?’

‘Oh, we’ll get a lift off someone.’ This seemed to satisfy Lexi. There was never any question of her or Mr Radley turning out to fetch Frances. My father, had he known what we were up to, would have insisted on taking and collecting us, door to door. As we were leaving, Rad came down the stairs three at a time, carrying the remains of his supper – a variation on that old favourite, the Greasy Dog – on a tray. He was wearing frayed, very faded jeans and a fisherman’s jumper with paint on and great unravelling holes in the elbows.

‘What do you think, Rad?’ said Frances, striking a pose.

He looked us over for a second or two, taking in our underdressed state and painted faces. ‘I think you look like a couple of tarts,’ he said indifferently, and clumped off to the kitchen. I was ready to wash my face there and then but Frances was impatient to set off, so we let ourselves out and tottered up to the bus stop. Lexi was right about the weather: my arms had broken out in goosepimples long before the bus came. I must have spent most of my teens being the wrong temperature. Fashion was so insanely perverse: chunky jumpers tucked into tight jeans in midsummer, bare legs and no jacket in winter.

The house which was our destination was a short walk from the common, and the last part of the journey was made on foot over the grass. As we minced along on tiptoes trying not to let our heels sink up to the hilt with every step, I noticed a familiar car crawl down the road bisecting the common and pull over into a parking space.

‘Isn’t that your dad?’ asked Frances, squinting, as I ducked behind a tree, dragging her with me.

‘Yes, I think so,’ I said, embarrassed and fearful that I had caught him out in some appalling deception.

‘What’s he doing?’

‘I don’t know. Keep still. What if he sees us?’

‘He won’t recognise you anyway,’ said Frances, reasonably. ‘Let’s just hang around here and see what happens.’ To my intense agitation she kept bobbing back and forth from behind the tree to give me progress reports. ‘I think he’s reading a book,’ she said, baffled. ‘He must be meeting someone.’

After half an hour or so of this, with nothing incriminating having come to light, Frances’ enthusiasm for detective work began to wane. The cold evening air was turning our legs a blotchy purple, and I felt some stirrings of remorse about my navy school overcoat.

‘He doesn’t seem to be waiting for anyone,’ Frances finally admitted. ‘He’s not looking up and down the road or anything. He’s just reading.’ As she said this there was the cough of a car starting and the Vauxhall Viva edged out and was soon lost in the traffic. Frances was flummoxed, but I thought I understood. When father vanished it was not because he had somewhere to go or someone to see. He just had to get away – from the house, from mother, perhaps even from me – and to sit alone and read his book in the privacy of his car was the finest freedom he could achieve.