21

In the summer of 1982 I achieved one of the great ambitions of my childhood: I was invited to join Lexi and Frances on their annual holiday. This was something I had secretly craved since that first letter arrived from Paris with tales of topless dancers and beggars on the Metro and single red roses.

My mother could not very well object: we would not be going away as a family at all, since my granny’s potential as an arsonist was firmly established in my parents’ minds. Leaving her behind was out of the question, but taking her with them would negate any benefits the holiday might bring. It was a holiday from her they needed. Lexi had taken the precaution of petitioning my mother and father first rather than leaving it up to me. A postcard of Burne-Jones’s Ophelia – not the most reassuring image – arrived one morning with the message:

Dear Mr and Mrs Onions

Frances and I would very much like Abigail to come on holiday to France with us this year. I hope you can spare your delightful daughter for a couple of weeks in August. We will take great care of her.

Yours truly

Alexandra Radley

Mother sniffed. ‘She writes with red pen,’ she said, as if this was a further sign of Lexi’s moral turpitude. ‘Doesn’t her husband ever go with them?’ she went on. ‘It seems such a peculiar arrangement.’ This year as other years father and son were going off together to The Trenches. The ritualistic significance of this was heightened as it was assumed that it would be their last trip. In September Rad was off to university; future holidays would doubtless be spent working to pay off debts. Though it was hard to picture Rad even managing to spend his grant. He didn’t drink much or smoke at all, and only bought new clothes with the greatest reluctance and wore them until they disintegrated. Dependent upon his A-level results he had a place at Durham to read Philosophy. The idea of acting as a career had not in the end appealed. He could always get involved in drama on the side, went his reasoning, but when would he ever have another chance to spend three years just thinking?

‘This is very kind of them,’ said father, picking up the postcard. ‘Your first trip abroad, Abigail.’

‘I wonder how much it will cost?’ said mother. ‘You’ll have to pay your way, you know, Abigail, petrol and so on.’ But when the subject was finally broached over the telephone by father, at mother’s prompting, Lexi dismissed the idea instantly.

‘Oh no – there won’t be any expenses. We’ll all share a room anyway. She’ll only need a little pocket money for ice creams and so on.’

In the event father gave me a thousand francs to take – a fortune, which I strapped to me in a money-belt like a holster under my clothes, and fretted over and checked twenty times a day.

Both my parents came with me to the Radleys’ to see me off. Typically the annual argument about which party needed which car was in progress as we arrived. Husband and wife were standing either side of the disputed vehicles, Lexi still dressed in her housecoat and turban. Mr Radley was adamant that he needed the Estate. He and Rad were not leaving for another week and he was apparently intending to spend the time hawking his paintings round various galleries and shops. ‘I can’t very well fit them in the Triumph, can I?’

‘But there are three of us,’ Lexi was saying in her schoolmistressy voice. ‘You can’t expect one of the girls to sit on the bench seat all the way to Menton.’

‘Why not? Blush is as skinny as a rake – she could fit in there quite easily.’

‘Abigail is not “skinny”; she is beautifully slim,’ said Lexi, who tended to bridle at any slur on the female form.

‘Skinny, slim, what’s the difference?’ Mr Radley smote his forehead in frustration. ‘The point is, she can fit in the back of a Spitfire more easily than a six by four canvas.’

‘She is actually perfectly proportioned. Hello Abigail’s parents,’ Lexi said without pausing. ‘We’re just having a row.’ And she took my small suitcase – locked and strapped against the rapacity of foreign chambermaids – and put it defiantly in the back of the Renault. Mr Radley promptly took it out and dumped it in the drive.

‘Well …’ said mother uneasily. This was her first encounter with the Radleys. Through the back gate I could see Frances taking washing off the line while Growth leapt up, snapping at the trailing garments. At the sight of me he came tearing up the drive, a pair of Lexi’s lacy knickers between his teeth, two ribbons of saliva swinging from his jowls. Mother recoiled like someone walking into a cobweb as the apparition flung himself at us, barking and drooling and trying to keep hold of the knickers.

‘We’d better say goodbye, Abigail,’ she said at last. ‘Have you got everything?’ I nodded briskly to be rid of them. ‘Passport, money, calamine lotion, diarrhoea tablets,’ she went on, determined not to spare me. Mr Radley’s lips twitched.

‘Yes, yes,’ I said, fairly bundling mother and father back up the drive. We exchanged hugs and kisses. ‘Phone us some time to let us know you’re safe,’ said mother. She looked quite tearful.

‘Cheer up,’ I heard father whisper to her as they got in the car. ‘She’s not off to boarding school.’

‘No, far from it,’ came back the reply, before the car door slammed.

Rad had meanwhile appeared in the doorway. He had obviously been listening from the hall. ‘If we take the roof off we can prop the canvases in the back of the Spitfire and you can hold on to them to stop them banging about while I drive.’ Rad was now a legitimate licence-holder.

‘Oh very dignified,’ said Mr Radley, striding off indoors.

‘Here, Rad, load these up,’ Lexi ordered, considering the argument well won. She pointed to her own large cases and Frances’ and my smaller ones. ‘I’ve got to go and change.’

By this time Frances had finished with the laundry and had joined Rad and me in the drive. ‘I suppose I’ll have to spend next week driving Dad all over the south-east with his paintings,’ said Rad gloomily, slinging the bags into the boot. ‘What a waste of time. He hasn’t flogged a single one in five years.’

‘Don’t worry,’ said Frances. ‘Rain’s forecast all next week.’

‘Ssh,’ said Rad, at the sound of approaching footsteps. But it was only Lexi, dressed for the journey in white jeans, red boots and a poncho which looked as though it might have been made from Growth’s least favourite car rug. Her hair was pinned up in a French pleat and a large pair of red-rimmed sunglasses covered half her face. The car keys dangled from her middle finger.

‘We’re off,’ she called back into the house. ‘See you in Arras. Look after him,’ she said to Rad.

Mr Radley had the good grace to appear in the doorway, waving, as we reversed out of the drive. ‘Behave yourself,’ was his final injunction. Frances was already rummaging through a box of cassettes looking for some suitable music. Between us on the back seat was a plastic sack full of sweets which Cecile had given Frances for the journey – lollipops and sherbet fountains and liquorice pipes – as if we were eight-year-olds.

‘Well, girls, I hope I can leave all the French speaking to you,’ Lexi said, glancing in the mirror. I wasn’t worried. There was no chance of Lexi fading into the background in any dialogue with officialdom, and her combination of polite and well-projected English and ferocious smiling would bring far quicker results than our bumbling O-level French. The journey to Folkestone was largely taken up with her delivering one of her lectures or exhortations. This one was on the preferability of the Many as opposed to the One, in the matter of boyfriends. ‘When I was your age my friends and I all went around together in a gang – it never occurred to us what sex we were. If one of the boys wanted to see a film he might issue a general invitation, and any one of the girls might go with him. There was never any pairing off. Much better that way.’

Frances and I would have been happy to number half a dozen boys amongst our acquaintance. Apart from Rad and Nicky there was only the bus-stop brigade – the lads from the Boys’ High with whom Frances enjoyed an on-going flirtation, and to whom I was about as interesting as her hockey stick. Less interesting, in fact, since the hockey stick could be seized and used for lifting skirts and making lewd gestures.

We were also instructed not to marry before the age of thirty. It was something to be contemplated only when all other areas of experience had been exhausted. This was puzzling. Lexi had married at twenty-three and didn’t have the air of a woman plagued by missed opportunity. Another of Lexi’s great precepts was that a girl should have no secrets from her mother. It was, of course, perfectly permissible for Frances to have secrets for recreational purposes, as it were, but she should never feel there was any subject that could not be broached.

‘All right. What’s oral sex?’ asked Frances.

Lexi blenched slightly, before offering an explanation in measured terms. Frances feigned retching.

‘Anything else you want to ask?’ said Lexi, confident that the worst was over.

‘Have you ever read my diary?’

‘No, never,’ said Lexi without a moment’s hesitation. ‘Mum read my diary when I was about your age because she thought I was seeing an unsuitable boy. There wasn’t anything the least bit incriminating in it, but it was years before I forgave her. She should have known that the mere fact that I kept a diary was proof of my innocence. As soon as I started doing the things she disapproved of I abandoned the diary altogether. So you see I don’t need to read yours – all the time you’re writing it I know you’re behaving yourself.’

Frances was flabbergasted.

‘Anything else?’

‘Why did you marry Dad?’

Lexi seemed more taxed by this question than by the earlier ones. I was shocked by it too, since it seemed to imply that Frances considered it an odd match, and although I had often privately wondered how two such divergent characters came together it felt like the sort of question which should never even occur to the product of the union.

‘I loved him,’ Lexi said finally. ‘I mean I still do,’ she added as an afterthought.

Once on the ferry we put our watches forward an hour, which made it lunchtime, so we ate our sandwiches, and then Lexi spread out her poncho on one of the long seats on deck and fell asleep in the sun. Frances and I roamed the corridors of the boat, losing the last of our English change on the slot machines, sniggering at our fellow passengers and gazing in the windows of the duty-free shops. Just outside Boulogne Lexi woke up, looking slightly crumpled, imprints of poncho tassels marking her cheeks, and disappeared to the Ladies to repair herself. She returned carrying a plastic bag containing two bottles of perfume – Chanel No. 5 for Frances and No. 19 for me. I was speechless with gratitude and delight. I had never been given such a lavish and frivolous gift before, had never in fact had any perfume of my own. An occasional squirt of my mother’s Tweed and a forbidden dab of her ancient and acidulated bottle of Joy was the limit of my experience. I could hardly bear to disturb the packaging, whereas Frances immediately tore into hers and began spraying herself with a vigour which put me in mind of mother taking on the aphids.

‘Steady,’ Lexi reproved mildly. ‘The effect you are after is one of subtlety.’

As the car rolled on to French tarmac I gave Frances a significant look, though the moment could not be expected to impress her so forcefully, seasoned traveller as she was. I scanned the scenery for signs of foreignness as Lexi, map open on the seat beside her, guided us along the right-hand side of the road towards Paris, our first stop. TOUTES DIRECTIONS/AUTRES DIRECTIONS offered one road sign. Frances and I devised a game which involved guessing the meaning of the advertising slogans on the hoardings by the side of the road: sometimes even identifying the product was hard enough.

Lexi, following established practice, was avoiding the motorway on account of the tolls, and, she said, to give us a better view of the countryside. Occasionally she would turn our music down to point out some church or monument, and we would be obliged to nod and enthuse. ‘I’m only doing this so you have something interesting to write in your diaries,’ she said.

Frances, sated by a big lunch and our earlier gorging on sweets, and half hypnotised by the chequered sunlight flashing through the windows, had soon dozed off and, fearful of being drawn into a conversation with Lexi in case it took a confessional turn, I closed my eyes too, mindful that I was missing my first experience of Abroad, and was pretty soon asleep.

We awoke to find that the fields and poplars and dusty linear villages had given way to the outskirts of Paris. The air was hazy with petrol fumes, and to either side of the road were grey factories, demolition yards full of wrecked cars, and grim, pastel-coloured apartment blocks with porthole windows, like giant cheese graters against the sky. Hoardings flashed past, streaked with grime. Much of the graffiti was in English, evidently the international language of hooliganism.

‘Yuk,’ said Frances, rubbing her eyes. ‘What a dump.’

But there in the distance was the gleaming eggshell white of Sacré Coeur and the blurred silhouette of the Eiffel Tower, remembered from a thousand books and postcards. Our hotel was in Montmartre, not quite in view of Sacré Coeur itself, but on a pavement clogged with parked cars and pigeon droppings. On the pavement opposite a woman in a leather jacket and leopard print miniskirt was standing in the doorway of a sex cinema, scratching mosquito bites on her thigh and wearily exhorting passing men to step inside.

PERVERSIONS

COCHONNERIES

a faded poster in the window promised.

‘Piggy perversions!’ said Frances delightedly. Lexi pulled a face.

The doorway of the hotel was guarded, indeed blocked, by a sleeping Alsatian, who staggered to his feet and limped off to a distant corner of the lobby after we had all stepped carefully over him. The proprietress, Madame Orselly, a small dumpy woman with dyed red hair, greeted Lexi and Frances with rapture, kissing them twice on each cheek. ‘And this is Abigail, our girlfriend.’ Lexi introduced me, and more bonjours were exchanged before Madame Orselly summoned a spotty youth from the back room to take our bags upstairs. Even in the early evening of a bright sunny day the staircases and corridors were in darkness and our porter and guide would periodically slap switches indicated by a glowing orange bulb which would give us a few seconds’ murky light before clicking off. I couldn’t help noticing that the walls seemed to tremble as we trooped past, and on reaching out to touch the wallpaper, I realised that they weren’t solid at all, but made of a piece of floral fabric stretched between a frame, flimsy as a stage set.

Our room had a double bed and a single covered with blue candlewick bedspreads, balding in places, rose wallpaper bleached by the sun, and an ornately carved dark wood wardrobe, almost big enough to park a car in. A hardboard partition, faced in the same rose paper and not quite reaching the ceiling, divided the ensuite facilities from the rest of the room. These consisted of a chipped sink, a squat, square bath with ledge for sitting on, and a bidet on wheels. After dismissing the porter untipped, Lexi stripped down to her knickers and, tossing the bolster aside, lay stretched out on the single bed with a flannel over her eyes.

‘I’m going to recover for an hour or so before dinner,’ she said, blindly. ‘You girls can explore if you like.’

Our explorations took us no further than the bar downstairs, where we sat and drank lemonade and made a fuss of the dog, who was called Boubous, and passed critical comment on the arriving and departing clientele. Madame Orselly brought us a glass of pastis each and a carafe of water, setting them down on the table with a wink, and a burst of French of which we understood not a word, and we responded with nods and smiles and mercis until she retreated, satisfied.

When Lexi came down an hour later we were both slightly giggly. Not from the pastis, which both of us had found undrinkable – Frances anyway having a puritanical disapproval of alcohol – but from our attempts to dispose of it discreetly without hurting Madame Orselly’s feelings. Tipping it into the carafe had to our surprise and mirth made the water turn cloudy, and we had resorted to slopping a little of the mixture into a vase of plastic chrysanthemums in an alcove behind us each time the proprietress’s back was turned.

We dined in the hotel from the sixty-franc menu. Assorted Pork-Butcher’s Meat offered the translation of Charcuterie. Frances and I stuck with pâté and steak, items which were at once familiar and foreign – the pâté served with mashed potato and gherkins and the steak, despite being bien cuit, still leaking blood into the chips. Lexi had quails, pathetic, wizened creatures with barely a mouthful of meat on them, and haricots verts thin as bootlaces.

For pudding Lexi insisted we all had crêpes flambéed at the table, even though Frances and I had been coveting the chocolate mousse we had seen being ferried to other diners.

‘I don’t want any alcohol with mine,’ said Frances primly, as the chef sloshed amaretto into the pan and ignited it with a pop.

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said Lexi. ‘You can’t flamber in Coca-Cola. Alcohol won’t hurt you in these quantities.’ She had had a modest half-bottle of red wine with her dinner. ‘Delicious,’ she said, spearing a dripping corner of pancake.

‘It’s poison,’ said Frances vehemently, trying to squeeze as much of the liquid out of hers as she could with her knife and fork. It was only over the course of this holiday that Frances’ aversion – which I had previously thought a pointless affectation – along with much else which puzzled me about the Radleys, began to make sense.