Learning to Swim: And Other Stories

But this was later, after things had worsened.

  “Jealous of Hoffimeier?” said my uncle. “Why should I be jealous of Hoffmeier?” His lips twitched. Behind his head was an anti-macassar, with crochet borders, made by my aunt.

  “Because he discovered a new species.”

  Even as I spoke I considered that the discovery might be only half the enviable factor. Hoffmeier had also won for himself a kind of immortality. The man might perish, but—so long at least as a certain animal survived—his name would, truly, live.

  “But—Hoffmeier—zoologist. Me? Just a dung-scraper.” Uncle Walter reverted to his self-effacing staccato.

  “Tell me about Hoffmeier.”

  Hoffmeier’s name, Hoffmeier’s deeds sounded endlessly on my uncle’s lip, but of the man himself one scarcely knew anything.

  “Hoffmeier? Oh, expert in his field. Undisputed …”

  “No—what was he like?” (I said “was” though I had no certain knowledge that Hoffmeier was dead.)

  “Like—?” My uncle, who was preparing himself, pipe raised to stress the items, for the catalogue of Hoffmeier’s credentials, looked up, his wet lips momentarily open. Then, clamping the pipe abruptly between his teeth and clutching the bowl with his hand, he stiffened into almost a parody of “the comrade recalled.”

  “The man you mean? Splendid fellow. Boundless energy, tremendous dedication. Couldn’t have met a kinder … Great friend to me …”

  I began to doubt the reality of Hoffmeier. His actual life seemed as tenuous and elusive as that of the antelope he had rescued from anonymity. I could not picture this stalwart scientist. He had the name of a Jewish impresario. I imagined my uncle going to him and being offered the antelope like some unique form of variety act.

  I asked myself: Did Hoffmeier exist?

  My uncle, poking his head forward oddly, in one of those gestures which made me think he could see my thoughts, said: “Why, he used to come here, stay here. Many a time. Sat in that armchair you’re sitting in now, ate at that table, slept—”

  But then he broke off suddenly and began to suck hard at his pipe.

  I was having no luck in my attempts to find a suitable flat. London grew more faceless, more implacable, the more I grew accustomed to it. It did not seem a place in which to be a teacher of maths. My philosophy lectures became more esoteric. I gave a particularly successful class on Pythagoras, who, besides being a mathematician, believed one should abstain from meat and that human souls entered the bodies of animals.

  Four weeks after my talk with Uncle Walter about Hoffmeier, things took a sudden bad turn. The male antelope developed a sort of pneumonia and the fate of the pair and—so far as we may know—of a whole species, seemed sealed. My uncle came in late from the Zoo, face drawn, silent. Within a fortnight the sick animal had died. The remaining female, which I saw on perhaps three subsequent occasions, looked up, sheepishly, apprehensively, from its solitary pen as if it knew it was now unique.

  Uncle Walter turned his devotion to the remaining antelope with all the fervour of a widowed mother transferring her love to an only child. His eyes now had a lonely, stigmatized look. Once, on one of my Sunday visits to the Zoo (for these were often the only occasions on which I could be sure of seeing him), the senior keeper in his section, a burly, amiable man called Henshaw, drew me to one side and suggested that I persuade Uncle Walter to take a holiday. It appeared that my uncle had requested that a bed be made up for him in the antelope’s pen, so that he need not leave it. A bundle of hay or straw would do, he had said.

  Henshaw looked worried. I said I would see what I could do. But, for all that I saw of my uncle, I scarcely had an opportunity to act on my promise. He came home after midnight, leaving a reek of stout in the hall, and sneaked straight upstairs. I felt he was avoiding me. Even on his off-duty days he would keep to his room. Sometimes I heard him muttering and moving within; otherwise an imprisoned silence reigned, so that I wondered should I, for his own sake, peer through the keyhole or leave behind the door a tray of his favourite fibrous food. But there were times when we met, as though by accident, in the kitchen, amongst his books in the front room. I said to him (for I thought only an aggressive humour might puncture his introspection) didn’t he think his affair with the female antelope was going too far? He turned on me the most wounded and mortified look, his mouth twisting and salivating; then he said in a persecuted, embattled tone: “You been speaking to Henshaw?”

  He seemed conspired against from all sides. One of the things that distressed him at this time was a proposal by the Council to build a new inner link road which, though it would not touch his own house, would cleave a path through much of the adjacent area. Uncle Walter had received circulars about this and subscribed to a local action group. He called the council planners “arse-holes.” This surprised me. I always imagined him as living in some remote, antiquated world in which the Zoological Society, august, venerable, was the only arbiter and shrine. So long as he could travel to the warm scent of fur and dung, it did not seem to me that he noticed the traffic thundering on the North Circular, the jets whining into Heathrow, the high-rises and flyovers—or that he cared particularly where he lived. But one Saturday morning when, by rare chance, we shared breakfast and when the noise of mechanical diggers could be heard through the kitchen window, this was disproved.

  My uncle looked up from his bowl of porridge and bran and studied me shrewdly. “Don’t like it here, do you? Want to go back to Norfolk?” he said. His eyes were keen. Perhaps my disillusion with London—or maybe the strain of sharing a house with him—showed in my face. I murmured non-commitally. Outside some heavy piece of machinery had started up so that the cups on the table visibly shook. My uncle turned to the window. “Bastards!” he said, then turned back. He ate with his sleeves rolled up, and his bare forearms, heavily veined and covered with gingery hairs, actually looked strong, capable. “Bastards,” he said. “Know how long I’ve lived here? Forty years. Grew up here. Your Aunt and I—. Now they want to …”

  His voice swelled, grew lyrical, defiant. And I saw in this man whom I had begun to regard as half insane, a grotesque victim of his own eccentricities, a glimpse of the real life, irretrievably lost, as if the door to a cell had momentarily opened.

  I began to wonder who my true uncle was. A creature who was not my uncle inhabited the house. When not at the Zoo he retired ever more secretively to his room. He had begun to remove to his bedroom from his “library” in the corner of the front room certain of his zoological volumes. He also took, from on top of the bookcase, the framed photographs of his wife. At three, at four in the morning, I would hear him reading aloud, as if from the Psalms or the works of Milton, passages from Lane’s Rare Species, Ericdorf’s The African Ungulates and from the work which I had already come to regard as Uncle Walter’s Bible, Ernst Hoffmeier’s The Dwarf and Forest Antelopes. In between these readings there were sporadic tirades against certain absent opponents, who included the borough planning committee and “that shit-can” Henshaw.

  The fact was that he had developed a paranoiac complex that the world was maliciously bent on destroying the Hoffmeier’s Antelope. He was under the illusion—so I learnt later from Henshaw—that, like children who believe that mere “loving” brings babies into the world, he could, solely by the intense affection he bore the female antelope, ensure the continuation of its kind. He began to shun me as if I too were a member of the universal conspiracy. We would pass on the stairs like strangers. Perhaps I should have acted to banish this mania, but something told me that far from being his enemy I was his last true guardian. I remembered his words: “The speed of the cheetah, the strength of the bear …” Henshaw phoned to suggest discreetly that my uncle needed treatment. I asked Henshaw whether he really liked animals.

  One night I dreamt about Hoffmeier. He had a cigar, a bow tie and a pair of opera-glasses and was marching through a jungle, lush and fantastic, like the jungles in pictures by Douanier Rousseau. In a ca
ge carried behind him by two bearers was the pathetic figure of my uncle. Watching furtively from the undergrowth was a four-legged creature with the face of my aunt.

  The attendances at my philosophy classes fell off. I devoted two lessons to Montaigne’s “Apology of Raymond Sebond.” Students complained I was leading them along eccentric and subversive paths. I did not mind. I had already decided to quit London in the summer.

  My uncle suddenly became communicable again. I heard him singing one morning in the kitchen. A thin, reedy, but strangely youthful tenor was crooning “Our Love is Here to Stay.” He had changed to the afternoon shift of duty and was preparing himself an early lunch before heading for the Zoo. There was a smell of frying onions. When I entered he greeted me in the way he used to when I was a Sunday guest, just grown into long trousers. “Ah Derek! Derek, me lad—have a Guinness,” he said, as though there were something to celebrate. He offered me a bottle and the opener. There were already four empties on the draining board. I wondered whether this was a miraculous recovery or the sort of final spree people are apt to throw before flinging themselves off balconies. “Uncle?” I said. But his sticky lips had parted in an inscrutable grin; his face was contained and distinct as if it might disappear; his eyes were luminous, as though, should I have looked close, I might have seen in them the reflections of scenes, vistas known only to him.

  I had with me a file of students’ work in preparation for my afternoon’s maths classes. He looked scoffingly at it. “All this—” he said. “You ought to have been a zoo-keeper.”

  He wiped his mouth. His long sallow face was creased. I realized that nowhere could there be anyone like my uncle. I smiled at him.

  That night I had a telephone call from Henshaw. It must have been about one in the morning. In a panic-stricken voice he asked me if I had seen Uncle Walter. I said no; I had been teaching at the adult institute, finished the evening at a pub and come home to bed. My uncle was probably already in bed when I came in. Henshaw explained that a security officer at the Zoo had found various doors to the special care unit unlocked; that on further investigation he had discovered the pen of the Hoffmeier’s Antelope empty. An immediate search of the Zoo precincts had begun but no trace was to be found of the missing animal.

  “Get your uncle!” screamed Henshaw maniacally. “Find him!”

  I told him to hang on. I stood in the hallway in bare feet and pyjamas. For one moment the urgency of the occasion was lost in the vision I had of the tiny creature, crossing the Prince Albert Road, trotting up the Finchley Road, its cloven feet on the paving stones, its soft eyes under the street-lamps, casting on North London a forlorn glimmer of its forest ancestry. Without its peer in the world.

  I went up to Uncle Walter’s room. I knocked on his door (which he would often keep locked), then opened it. There were the books scattered on the floor, the fetid remnants of raw vegetables, the shredded photos of his wife … But Uncle Walter—I had known this already—was gone.

  Gabor

  “THIS IS GABOR,” SAID MY father in a solemn, rehearsed, slightly wavering voice.

  This was early in 1957. The war was still then quite fresh in the memory—even of those, like myself, who were born after it. Most households seemed to have framed photographs of figures in uniform, younger Dads, jauntily posed astride gun barrels, sitting on wings. Across the asphalt playground of my County Primary School the tireless struggle between English and Germans was regularly enacted. This was the only war, and its mythology ousted other, lesser intrusions into peace. I was too young to be aware of Korea. Then there was Suez, and Hungary.

  “Gabor, this is Mrs. Everett,” continued my father, enunciating slowly, “Roger’s Mummy. And this is Roger.”

  Gabor was a lanky, dark-haired boy. He was dressed in a worn black jacket, a navy blue jumper, grey shorts, long grey socks and black shoes. Only the jacket and limp haversack, which he held in one hand, looked as if they were his. He had a thick, pale, straight-sided face, dark, horizontal eyes and a heavy mouth. Above his upper lip—I found this remarkable because he was only my age—was a crescent of gossamer, blackish hairs, like a faint moustache.

  “Hello,” said my mother. Poised in the doorway, a fixed smile on her face, she was not at all clear what was to be done on occasions like this—whether motherly hugs or formality were required. She had half expected to be ready with blankets and soup.

  Father and the newcomer stood pathetically immobile on the doorstep.

  “Hello Gabor,” I said. One adult custom which seemed to me, for once, eminently practical, and vindicated by moments like this, was to shake hands. I reached out and took the visitor’s wrist. Gabor went a salmony colour under his pale skin and spoke, for the first time, something incomprehensible. Mother and Father beamed benignly.

  Gabor was a refugee from Budapest.

  He was largely Father’s doing. As I see it now, he was the sort of ideal foster-child he had always wanted; the answer to his forlorn, lugubrious, strangely martyrish prayers. Father had been an infantry officer during the war. He had been in North Africa and Normandy and at the liberation of concentration camps. He had seen almost all his friends killed around him. These experiences had given him the sense that suffering was the reality of life and that he had, in its presence, a peculiarly privileged understanding and power to reassure. Peace was for him a brittle veneer. He was not happy with his steady job in marine insurance, with the welfare state blandishments of those post-ration years. The contentments of fatherhood were equivocal. Now, as I look back, I see him waiting, watching over me, the corners of his stern mouth melancholically down-turned, waiting for me to encounter pain, grief, to discover that the world was not the sunny playground I thought it to be; so that he could bestow on me at last—with love I am sure—the benefits of his own experience, of his sorrow and strength, the large, tobaccoey palms of his protection.

  I must have hurt him. While he lived with his war-time ghosts, I was Richard Todd as Guy Gibson, with an RT mask made from my cupped hand, skimming ecstatically over our back lawn to bomb the Möhne Dam; or Kenneth More as Douglas Bader, cheerily cannonading the Luftwaffe.

  Father scanned the newspapers. At headlines of trouble and disaster he looked wise. When the news broke of the uprising in Hungary and its suppression, and later the stories of orphaned Hungarian children of my generation coming to our shores, who needed to be found homes, he acquired a new mission in life.

  I did not take kindly to Gabor’s arrival. Though he was not a proper adoption and was to be with us at first only on what the authorities called a “trial basis,” I was envious of him as as substitute child—a replacement for myself. A minor war, of a kind unenvisaged, between England and Hungary, might have ensued in our house. But I saw how—from the very start—I had a facility with Gabor which my parents did not, and the pride I derived from this checked my resentment. Besides, Gabor had the appeal of someone who—like my father—had lived through real bloodshed and conflict, though in his case the experience was of the present, not of the past, and belonged moreover to a boy my own age. Perhaps—unlike my father—he would share in, and enhance, the flavour of my war games.

  Should this happen it would assuage another long-standing grievance against my father. I could not understand why, seasoned veteran as he was, he did not participate in, at least smile on, my imaginary battles. I began to regard him as a bad sport and—more serious—to doubt his own quite authentic credentials. I tried to see in my father the features of my cinema heroes but failed to do so. He lacked their sunburned cragginess or devilmay-care nonchalance. His own face was pasty, almost clerical. Consequently I suspected that his real exploits in the war (which I had only heard about vaguely) were lies.

  The first lesson in English manners I taught Gabor was how to shoot Germans.

  When I reflect on this, it was remarkable that he grasped what was required of him. Not only did he scarcely know a word of English, but there was an historical difficulty. I had absol
utely no knowledge of Hungary’s role in the Second World War (I was ignorant of its collaboration with the Nazis), which I took to be a national duel between England and Germany. Nonetheless, when the smoke from our bren guns or hand grenades had cleared, and I informed Gabor, after bravely reconnoitering, of another knocked out Panzer, another slaughtered infantry patrol, he would look up at me with implicit trust and grin, manically, jubilantly.

  “Jó,” he would say. “Good, good.”

  Father was horrified at the careless zeal with which Gabor took part in my games. He could not understand how a boy who had known real violence, whose own parents (for all we knew) had been brutally killed, could lend a part so blithely to these fantasies. Some impenetrable barrier—like a glass wall which gave to my father the forlorn qualities of a goldfish—existed for him between reality and illusion so that he could not cross from one to the other. But it was not just this that distressed him. He saw how Gabor looked to me and not to him, how when he returned from our forays at the end of the garden Gabor would follow me like a trusted commander; how, from the very beginning, that affinity which he had hoped to have with this child of suffering had eluded him. I often wondered how they had managed together on that first day, when father had gone up to “collect” Gabor, like some new purchase. I pictured them coming home, sitting mutely on opposite seats in the train compartment as they bounced through suburbia, like two lost souls.

  “Gabor,” Father would say as he lit his cigarette after dinner, with the air of being about to make some vital announcement or to ask some searching question.

  “Igen?” Gabor would say. “Yes?”

  Father would open his lips and look into Gabor’s face, but something, some obstacle greater than that of language, would leave his words trapped.

  “Nothing.”

  “Yes?”

  Gabor would go pink; his eyes would swivel in my direction.

  Later, when Gabor had acquired a little more English, I asked him whether he liked my father. He gave a rambling, inarticulate answer, but I understood it to mean from the manner in which it was spoken that he was afraid of him. “Tell me about your own mother and father,” I asked. Gabor’s chin trembled, his lips twisted, his eyes went oily. For two days not even the prospect of Messerschmitts to be shot down persuaded him to smile.