Learning to Swim: And Other Stories

  Gabor went to my primary school with me. Except when he had special language tuition he was scarcely ever out of my company. He was an intelligent boy and after eighteen months his English was remarkably fluent. He had a way of sitting in the class with a sad expression on his face which made all the teachers fall for him. I alone knew he was not really sad. My closeness to Gabor gave me a superior standing among my English friends. Gabor would now and then mutter phrases in Hungarian because he knew this gave him a certain charisma; I would acquire even more charisma by casually translating them. In our newly-built brick school, with its grass verges and laburnums, its pictures of the Queen, maps of the Commonwealth and catkins in jam-jars, there was very little to disturb our lives. Only the eleven-plus hung, like a precipice, at the end of it all.

  In the summer holidays Gabor and I would play till dark. At the end of our garden were the ramshackle plots of some old small holdings, and beyond that open fields and hedges sloping down to a road. These provided limitless scope for the waging of all types of warfare. We would scale the fence at the end of the garden, steal venturously past the tumbled sheds and smashed cucumber frames of the small holdings (still technically private property) and into the long grass beyond (later they built a housing estate over all this). At one point there was a sizeable crater in the ground, made by an actual flying-bomb in the war, filled with old paint cans and discarded prams. We would crouch in it and pretend we were being blown up; after each grisly death our bodies would be miraculously reconstituted. And everywhere, amongst the brambles and ground-ivy, there were little oddities, and discoveries, holes, tree-stumps, rusted tools, shattered porcelain, debris of former existences (I believed it was this ground-eye view of things which adults lacked), which gave to our patch of territory infinite imaginary depths.

  A few impressions are sufficient to recapture that time: my mother’s thin wail, as if she herself were lost, coming to us from the garden fence as the dark gathered: “Roger! Gabor!”; Gabor’s hoarse breath as we stalked, watching for enemy snipers, through the undergrowth, and the sporadic accompaniment, as if we shared a code, of his Hungarian: “Menjünk! Megvárj!”; Father, trying to restrain his anger, his disappointment, as we trailed in finally through our back door. He would scan disapprovingly our sweaty frames. He would furrow his brows at me as if I was Gabor’s corruptor, and avoid Gabor’s eyes. He would not dare raise his voice or lay a finger on me because of Gabor’s presence. But even if Gabor had not been there he would have been afraid to use violence against me.

  Father would not believe that Gabor was happy.

  In the summer in which I waited with foreboding to hear the result of my eleven-plus, and Gabor also waited for his own fate to be sealed (he had not sat the exam, the education committee deciding he was a “special case”), something happened to distract us from our usual bellicose games. We had taken to ranging far into the field and to the slopes leading down to the road, from which, camouflaged by bushes or the tall grass, we would machine-gun passing cars. The July weather was fine. One day we saw the motor-bike—an old BSA model (its enemy insignia visible through imaginary field-glasses)—lying near the road by a clump of hawthorn. Then there was the man and the girl, coming up one of the chalk gulleys to where the slope flattened off—talking, disappearing and reappearing, as they drew level with us, behind the banks and troughs of grass, like swimmers behind waves. They dipped for some time behind one of the grass billows, then appeared again, returning. The man held the girl’s hand so she would not slip down the gulley. The girl drew her pleated skirt between her legs before mounting the pillion.

  The motor-cycle appeared the next day at the same time, about five in the hot afternoon. Without saying anything to each other, we returned to the same vantage point the following day, and our attention turned from bombarding cars to stalking the man and the girl. On the fourth day we hid ourselves in a bed of ferns along the way the couple usually took, from which we could just see, through the fronds, a section of road, the top of the gulley and, in the other direction, at eye level, the waving ears of grass. Amongst the grass there were pink spears of willow herb. We heard the motor-bike, heard its engine cut, and saw the couple appear at the top of the gulley. The girl had a cotton skirt and a red blouse. The man wore a T-shirt with sweat at the arm-pits. They passed within a few feet of our look-out then settled some yards away in the grass. For a good while we saw just the tops of their heads or were aware of their presence only by the signs of movement in the taller stems of grass. Sounds of an indistinct and sometimes hectic kind reached us through the buzzing of bees and flies, the flutter of the breeze.

  “Mi az?” whispered Gabor. “Mit csinálnak?” Something had made him forget his English.

  After a silence we saw the girl sit up, her back towards us. Her shoulders were bare. She said something and laughed. She tilted her head back, shaking her dark hair, raising her face to the sun. Then, abruptly turning round and quite unwittingly smiling straight at us as if we had called her, she presented to us two white, sunlit, pink-flowered globes.

  On the way back I suddenly realised that Gabor was trying not to cry. Bravely and wordlessly he was fighting back tears.

  It so happened that that day was my parents’ wedding anniversary. Every July this occasion was observed with punctilious sentimentality. Father would buy, on his way home from work, a bottle of my mother’s favourite sweet white wine. My mother would cook “Steak au Poivre” or “Duck à l’Orange” and put on her organdie summer frock with bits of tulle around the neckline. They would eat. After the meal my father would wash up, sportingly wearing my mother’s frilled apron. If the evening was fine they would sit outside, as if on some colonial patio. My father would fetch the Martell. My mother would put on the gramophone so that its sound wafted through the open window, “Love is a Many Splendoured Thing” by Nat King Cole.

  In previous years, given an early supper and packed off to bed, I had viewed this ritual from a distance, but now, perhaps for Gabor’s sake, we were allowed to partake. Solemnly we sipped our half-glasses of sweet wine; solemnly we watched my parents. Inside, we still crouched, eyes wide, amongst the ferns.

  “Fifteen years ago,” Father explained to Gabor, “Roger’s mother and I were married. Wed-ding ann-i-versary,” he articulated slowly so that Gabor might learn the expression.

  I looked at Gabor. He kept his head lowered towards the tablecloth. His eyes were dry but I could see that at any moment they might start to gush.

  Mother and Father ate their steaks. Their cutlery snipped and scraped meticulously. “Gorgeous,” my father said after the second mouthful, “beautiful.” My mother blinked and drew back her lips obligingly. I noticed that, despite her puffy dress, her chest was quite flat.

  Gabor caught my eyes. Some sorrow, some memory of which none of us knew, could no longer be contained. Father intercepted the glance and turned with sudden heed towards Gabor. For the first time that evening something like animation awoke in his eyes. I could imagine him, in a moment or so, pushing aside the remainder of his steak, rejecting with a knitting of his brows the bottle of Barsac, the bowl of roses in the middle of the table, grasping Gabor’s hand and saying: “Yes, of course, this is all nonsense …”

  But this was not to be. I was determined, if only to defy father, that Gabor would not cry. There was something in our experience of that afternoon, I recognised, for which tears were only one response. Gabor relowered his head, but I pinned my gaze, like a mind-reader, on his black mop of hair, and now and then his eyes flashed up at me. A nervous, expectant silence hung over the dinner table, in which my parents resumed eating, their elbows and jaws moving as if on wires. I saw them suddenly as Gabor must have seen them—as though they were not my parents at all. Each time Gabor looked up I caught his eyes, willing them not to moisten, to read my thoughts, to follow my own glance as I looked, now at my father’s slack jowl, now at Mother’s thin throat.

  Gabor sat in front of the window. With the
evening light behind him and his head bent forward, his infant moustache showed distinctly.

  Then suddenly, like boys in church who cannot restrain a joke, he and I began to laugh.

  I learnt that I was to be accepted at a new grammar school. Gabor, by some inept piece of administration, was granted a place at a similar, but not the same institution, and arrangements were made for continuing his private tuition. The whole question of Gabor’s future, whether or not he was to be formally adopted into our family, was at this stage “under review.” We had till September to pretend we were free. We watched for the couple on their motor-bike. They did not reappear. Somehow the final defeat or destruction of the last remnants of the German army, accomplished that summer, did not compensate for this. But our future advance in status brought with it new liberties. Father, whose face had become more dour (I sometimes wondered if he would be glad or sorry if the authorities decided that he could legally be Gabor’s father), suggested that I might spend a day or two of our holiday showing Gabor round London. I knew this was a sacrifice. We had gone to London before, as a family, to show Gabor the sights. Gabor had trailed sheepishly after my parents, showing a token, dutiful interest. I knew that Father had had a dream once, which he had abandoned now, of taking Gabor by himself up to London, of showing him buildings and monuments, of extending to him his grown man’s knowledge of the world, his shrewdness in its ways, of seeing his eyes kindle and warm as to a new-found father.

  I took Gabor up on the train to London Bridge. I knew my way about from the times Father had taken me, and was a confident guide. We had fun. We rode on the Underground and on the top decks of buses. In the City and around St. Paul’s there were bomb-sites with willow-herb sprouting in the rubble. We bought ice-creams at the Tower and took each other’s photo in Trafalgar Square. We watched Life Guards riding like toys down the Mall. When we got home (not long before Father himself came in from work) Father asked, seeing our contented faces: “Well, and how was the big city?” Gabor replied, with the grave, wise expression he always had when concentrating on his English: “I like London. Iss full history. Iss full history.”

  The Hypochondriac

  I REMEMBER THAT DAY FOR two things. It was a bright, keen day in mid-September. Autumn had come. Everything was sharp and conspicuous …

  Firstly, it was that day that my wife and I learnt that she was pregnant. She gave me the sample in the morning. I took it myself to be tested at the hospital. Perhaps it is strange for a doctor to be clinical even with his own wife. I handed the sample to McKinley in the lab and said, “I’ll wait for this one—it’s my wife.” A little while later McKinley returned: “Positive.” But even before this my wife had known—those early intuitions are often right—that she was really pregnant. We ought to have been glad. When I’d left that morning with the sample I looked at her lingeringly—to see, perhaps, if her intuitions went any further. The sun was dazzling in our kitchen. She turned away, and then I kissed her, lightly, on the top of the head, as one kisses an unhappy child. When McKinley said, “Congratulations,” it took an effort to make the usual display of pleasure …

  And then it was that day that I first saw M. He was the last on my list for evening surgery, and I knew somehow, as soon as he entered, that he was a fake. He spoke of headaches and vague pains in the back and chest. He was a slight, bland, dull-looking youth of barely twenty. You can tell when someone is describing a pain that isn’t really there.

  “What sort of pain?”

  “A kind of stabbing.”

  “Are you getting it now?”

  “Oh yes—it’s always there.”

  “A constant stabbing pain?”

  I sounded his chest, took his pulse and went through a few other motions just to please him. At length I said to him: “I’d say you’re a perfectly fit young man. You’re physically sound. Are you worried about anything? I think this pain of yours is quite imaginary. I think you’ve imagined it enough to make it actually exist. But that doesn’t mean it’s anything.” I said this kindly enough. I really wanted to say: “Oh go away.” I wanted to have finished surgery and be alone. I ushered him to the door. He had this pale, ineffectual face which I disliked. At the door he suddenly turned and said: “Doctor, the pain’s quite real”—with such earnestness that I said hastily (this was a mistake), “If you’re still worried come and see me next week.”

  Then he was gone down the gravel path leading from my waiting room.

  I hadn’t seen my wife since the morning. I’d phoned her from the hospital. I said, “It’s positive—congratulations,” just to see if she would react as I had done to McKinley. She said, “Well I knew.” Then I had matters to attend to at the hospital, a meeting with the radiologist, some calls in the afternoon; and when I returned I got straight on with my evening surgery without even going into the house. This is not unusual. My surgery and waiting room are an annexe of the house, but my wife and I look upon them as distinct zones. My wife never enters my surgery even out of surgery hours; and there are times—that evening was one—when I feel more at home at my surgery desk than in the house which is only the other side of a door.

  I said good-night to Susan, my receptionist, and pretended to be busy with some record cards. It was not quite seven. The sun which had shone all day was low, but bright, crisp and ruddy. Through my surgery window I could see the apples swelling on the apple trees in our back garden, the orange berries on the pyracantha, the virginia creeper turning red on the house wall. I have always been pleased by the way the garden is visible from my surgery and presses in on it as if on some sort of conservatory. I think my patients find this reassuring. Often they remark gladly on the view. I sat for some time at my desk looking at the garden. I didn’t want to think of my wife. I thought of my Great-Uncle Laurie. Then I looked at my watch, got up and locked the outer doors of the waiting room and surgery, and passed through the connecting door into the house. As I did so I put on a cheerful, earnest face, as I do for my patients. My wife was in the kitchen. She is twenty-nine, young enough to be my daughter. I took her in my arms but with scarcely any pressure, the way one touches something fragile and precious. She said: “Well, we will have to wait and see.”

  M. came to my surgery the week following his first visit, and the week after that, and at intervals right through that winter. I was wrong in ever wavering on his first visit. I summed him up as a hypochondriac of the thorough-going kind. For one thing there was his persistence. For another, there was the seemingly infinite adaptability of his symptoms and the discrepancies in his description of them. For example, when, on one visit, I had dismissed some localized pain as purely fictional, he would return a second time to tell me that the pain had “travelled”—from chest to lower abdomen, from heart to kidneys—so that I was obliged to reconsider it. After a while this “pain” became something omnipresent and amorphous, obscurely pervading his system but ready to fix itself in those regions where he imagined, I suppose, I would be least able to disregard it. He would often describe in some detail the classic symptoms of certain complaints—the sort of thing anyone can read in medical encyclopaedias—but he would forget some tell-tale associative factor or he would fail to reproduce the physical signs. Then he would fall back on his old stand-by: “But Doctor, the pain’s quite real,” and I on mine: “For God’s sake—there’s nothing wrong with you.”

  I could not be rid of him by merely rebutting his complaints. It occurred to me, of course, that there was another line to be taken. M.’s hypochondria itself, palpably neurotic, was the only thing about him which could be legitimately treated clinically. I should have questioned him about his mental history, his anxieties, perhaps referred him for psychiatric treatment. But I did not do this. It seemed to me that to take M.’s condition seriously would quite probably have the effect of indulging and encouraging it rather than removing it. I could not suppress the suspicion that he was carrying out some elaborate joke at the expense of medicine and I did not want to fall vi
ctim to it. Besides, I had no wish to extend an already excessive interest, on his part, in disease. There is nothing I despise more. Don’t mistake me. I did not become a doctor out of an interest in disease, but because I believe in health. The fact that half my family were medical men makes no difference to my motives. There are two ways of confronting disease: one is sound practical knowledge; the other is health. These are the two things I value most. And health, believe me, is not the absence of but the disregard for disease. I have no time for the mystique of suffering.

  So I could give M. nothing more than the crude advice that a thousand would-be patients give themselves—very effectively: “Forget about it. It’s nothing. You’re fine.” And I said: “I don’t want to see you here again.”

  But he did come again, and he was an infernal nuisance. There were times when I had to restrain myself from shouting at him at the top of my voice, from grasping hold of him and ejecting him bodily from my surgery. Sometimes a quite violent hatred for that despondent face, for his pleading manner rose inside me. I wanted to hit him. Then I would begin to treat him with a kind of casual indifference—the way a bartender treats a regular customer who comes in every night and drinks alone at the bar, cheerlessly but harmlessly. Then I would get angry again; angry at M., angry at my own acquiescence. “Look,” I said, “I have really ill people to attend to. Do you know what really ill people are? You are wasting my time and preventing me from helping people who really require help. Go away. Do something! Take up ski-ing or mountaineering—then perhaps you might find yourself in genuine need of a doctor!” But he would not be beaten: “I am really ill.”