Learning to Swim: And Other Stories

  Scraps of tattered lino covered the floor and stairs. Smells of cooking mingled in the air. The people in front of me were like characters in some stage thriller in which I took the role of prime suspect. Everything was strange.

  I managed to hold on to myself sufficiently to say: “Look, M.’s been coming to see me for some time—I’m quite aware of his condition. Now”—I turned to the girl in glasses—“I gather it was this young lady who phoned me this morning. I’d like to talk to her—alone. I’d be grateful if you others allowed me to do so.”

  They looked at me for a while as if they had no intention of moving, then, slowly, they slunk away. The West Indian said over his shoulder to the girl: “You tell him, Janie!”

  We went to the girl’s room on the first floor. It was a gloomy, cluttered room, relieved by coloured rugs over the chairs and potted plants on the mantel-piece. She lit a cigarette and spoke readily but with suspicion in her voice. She described a collection of varied, incoherent symptoms—like the ones M. described to me in my surgery—which added up to nothing precise in my mind. I listened impassively. When she saw that I appeared unimpressed it became plain that she disliked me. I thought: If I could tell her.

  “Any vomiting, fever—flushes, rashes?” I asked.

  She shrugged as if it were my business to observe such things.

  “Doctor, he was crying out in pain—he was in agony.”

  “I see.”

  I said that I would like to see M.’s room. I don’t know why this was important to me. She said hesitantly, “All right. It’s the one next door. I took the key when the ambulance left.”

  As we moved along the passageway I asked, “Do you know him? Has he been here long?”

  “Keeps to himself. Quiet. We thought he was foreign at first. We’d like to see him more but we don’t push.”

  “Lonely?”

  “Perhaps.”

  The woman who had spoken first when I arrived appeared again on the stairs. “Poor boy, never no trouble to anyone.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  M.’s room was a complete contrast to what I had seen of the rest of the house. Everything smacked of neatness, cleanliness, order. The bed, along the wall, was dishevelled, but apart from this the furniture—an armchair, a coffee table, a table with two wooden chairs, a chest of drawers and a wardrobe—seemed fixed in prescribed positions and unused, as if in a room unoccupied and waiting for guests. There were no clothes or newspapers left lying about, no odds and ends on the mantel-piece. In one corner, in an alcove, there was a sink and draining board, a work-surface with two gas rings and a kettle, and cupboards above and below. All this was old, chipped and corroded, but there were no dirty plates left in the sink, no uncleared food, and the draining board was wiped clean. There was nothing in the room to indicate the life that used it—save perhaps the books, in a double row of shelves, over the bed: a small, varied collection thinly covering a wide range of topics, like the books of a schoolboy who has many subjects to learn. Amongst them I noticed, with sour satisfaction, the faded spine of an old Black’s Medical Dictionary. All this depressed me and made me uneasy. I looked around M.’s bed and opened a small bedside cupboard. I don’t know what I hoped to find—a cache of empty chemist’s bottles, the disordered notes of some amateur self-diagnosis. There was nothing. “He’s not ‘on’ anything, if that’s what you think,” said the girl, now quite open in her reproaches. We moved towards the door. Before we went out into the passage I took a last look round and I knew what made me feel uneasy, even threatened. It was the room of an innocent, a child, waiting for life to upset it.

  Before I left I said to the girl: “Thank you. I’ll get in touch with the hospital. I am sorry I wasn’t here earlier but, if you’ll believe me, I don’t think there’s any real cause for alarm.”

  She nodded coldly.

  I drove back. I felt calm, as far as M. was concerned. But I had this forboding inside, as though for myself. I got back late to open surgery. I did not phone St. Leonard’s until six. I knew who should be the senior duty doctor in Casualty.

  “Tony? It’s Alan Collins here. Have you got a patient of mine there? Name’s M.”

  “Yes—we have”—the voice seemed to modify itself rapidly—“I’m afraid we have. He’s dead.”

  “Dead?”

  For several seconds I was unable to say anything else. I wanted to know why Tony should trick me.

  “About an hour ago. Nearly a DOA case. You’re his GP?”

  “But what the hell from, for Christ’s sake?”

  “Well—we were rather hoping you might be able to tell us that.”

  I did not tell my wife about M.’s death. For ten days or so I had to assimilate the fact of it myself, to face the autopsy reports and inquest (which could reach no certain conclusions about the causes of M.’s death, other than the immediate ones of sudden coma and respiratory failure) and the possibility of an inquiry, which was waived, into my own professional conduct. Throughout all this I had to overcome a feeling that something had cracked inside me, that some firm footing on which I had previously relied had given under me. I suppose I was suffering from shock and mental stress of a quite clinical order. I said to myself: Look at this as you would the case of some patient of yours. I became incommunicative and withdrawn. I stayed in my surgery long after evening surgery had finished. Susan noticed the change in me, so did my surgery patients, and so, of course, did Barbara. If I had told her everything and sought her comfort I dare say it would have helped. But I had already refused her attention once when she’d said I looked ill; and, besides, it was I who had said so heatedly to her, weeks ago, that there was nothing wrong with M. In any case I had become—how shall I put this?—suddenly afraid of my wife, of the fact of her pregnancy. I don’t know why. It was as if her fullness matched a void I felt in myself.

  She must have seen all this only as coldness and indifference. It was February. She was nearly seven months pregnant. One night, as she lay in bed, she began to sob—long, heavy, breathless sobs, as if she had been quite abandoned. When I put my arm round her she moaned: “It’s his child, it’s his child. I know it.” Then for a long while she said nothing but only continued sobbing, the sobs growing louder into helpless groans, her face in her hands, her body shuddering. I tried not to hear the sobs. I said to myself: In a crisis you must try to ignore the pain, the cries. I sat by my wife in my pyjamas, holding her sides as if to repress her sobs. I did not know if I believed her. I said at length: “I understand.” And then, after another interval: “I wish it had been my child.” She raised herself up and turned to me—her tears made her look like something alien, like a monster: “It would have been worse if it was your child.” And she held her face, taut, in front of mine until I looked away.

  In the surgery the next morning I avoided the eyes of my patients. I wrote out prescriptions rapidly and tore them off the pad. Perhaps they saw that something was wrong. I wanted surgery to be over; but it was the dead, worn-out end of winter—endless “chests,” coughs and rheumatic pains. After perhaps fifteen visitors had left I pressed my buzzer yet again. I had got up to return something to my filing cabinet. When the door was opened my head was lowered. I said, “One moment,” then turned towards the person who had entered. I said, “What?” and stepped forward. And it must have been then that I collapsed, for I remember nothing else, save being helped off the floor and into my chair, my patients in the waiting room being sent away, Susan bending over me, and, later, Barbara.

  It was M. I had seen.

  Now I sit in the armchair in the living room by the rear window, the telephone and my pills on the table beside me. If I look along the wall of the house I can just see him, through a chink in the blinds in the surgery: Mason, my substitute, bending over the desk, getting up and moving out of sight to examine a patient, like some ghost of myself. He has been my “temporary” replacement now for nearly ten weeks. They say I cannot work again yet. Long and complete rest is indicated.
I don’t know—if it were my case—if I would prescribe this. First it was my colleagues who looked after me. I saw their grudging faces—no doctor likes to treat another doctor, it’s a sort of ill omen. Then it was Barbara. Though she needed tending herself, it was she who cared for me. And I had no choice but to submit. Perhaps there was a change here; perhaps she became happier, these last ten weeks. I don’t know. For a while I was like the child she mothered.

  It is a bright, fresh morning towards the end of April, breezy—warm and chill at the same time. In the garden I can see daffodils and the white sprays of blossom on the apple trees, whipped by sudden gusts. Somewhere in the maternity wing at St. Leonard’s my wife is about to give birth to a baby. If I were not under contrary orders I would be there. Perhaps she is being delivered at this very moment. I wait, by the telephone, catching glimpses of Mason and watching the wind play in the garden.

  It was under the apple trees that Great-Uncle Laurie used to sit on warm summer days in the big garden we had when I was small, constantly filling his mouth with titbits, swilling expensive wine and smoking his endless fat cigars.

  I admired him then; though I had feared him once. He was a surgeon at Bart’s; a senior surgeon of renown, who had performed his first operations in the days of chloroform and ether, when the standard surgical dress was waistcoat, apron and rolled sleeves. There were photographs of Uncle Laurie with bits he had removed from patients. I feared him, as I feared all my mother’s family—uncles, great-uncles—with their black coats and eyes that seemed to look into your insides; but I feared Great-Uncle Laurie most, with his saws and bone-chisels.

  I did not understand, you see, how you could live without fear. I was ignorant and naive.

  But, more than this, I did not understand how Uncle Laurie, who had opened people up for a living, could retire (when I was nine), put away his instruments and devote himself thereafter to food and drink; how a man whose business had been with disease could ignore his own knowledge and the strictures of his doctor and grow fat, short-winded, red-faced and sedentary. Under the apple tree he looked perfectly at peace with the world. And this made me fear him more. He saw my fear. “What are you afraid of?” he said. And to my mother: “That boy will grow up a bundle of nerves unless you do something about it.”

  But it was he who did something—that afternoon our cat died.

  My mother had gone into the kitchen, discovered the body, thinking she was the first to do so, and returned at once to inform us all. Everyone wondered how to dispose of the corpse. I hung my head, but Uncle Laurie watched me. While the others fussed he said: “Come with me. We’ll dispose of him—leave the boy with me awhile.” And he got up slowly from his wicker chair, stubbing his cigar out irritably.

  He led me into the garage and squeezed his bulk with difficulty alongside our car, to the work bench at the rear. He cleared some tools off the bench, placed a piece of oilcloth over the space and then a wooden board over the cloth. His arms were massive, but at the end of them were precise, agile fingers like a pianist’s. He fixed the car inspection-lamp, with its long flex, on the work bench in such a way that its light fell on the board, combined with the light from the rear garage window. “Now,” he said, “before the thing’s too stiff.” He waddled out of the garage and returned after a while bearing Gus in one arm and in the other a black leather bag containing scalpels, forceps and probes.

  “You’re afraid of these things eh? Of dead animals? Watch.”

  And then, in what seemed a mere handful of minutes, Uncle Laurie pinned the cat to the board, opened it up, pointed out to me its vital organs, demonstrated how it had lived, performed its functions and died—of a heart attack—briefly related the physiology of cats to that of human beings and gathered together the remains for burial.

  He talked in a detached monotone, his face heavy and disinterested, as if his mind was on something else.

  Throughout all this I was not allowed to turn my eyes from the foraging of the scalpel. My head was pushed forward so I would see better and miss nothing. I breathed Gus’s internal odours.

  “You see, there is nothing to worry about when you know what is there and you know how it works.”

  He gave a sort of satisfied grunt. Perhaps he was proud of his performance; though I did not see him smile. He wiped his instruments clean with a kind of ponderous disdain, as if, if he wished, he could put Gus’s parts together again, like a motor, and bring him back to life.

  Later I saw him in the garden sucking a peach.

  But I knew now why he could sit so contentedly under the trees, enjoying his cigar and the sunshine on his face, why he could make himself fat and breathless, careless of the consequences. You see, health is not the absence of but the disregard for disease.

  That day I knew I would become a doctor.

  I watch Mason moving behind the chink in the blinds in the surgery. I don’t know if I believe in ghosts. As a doctor, a man of science, it is not my business to believe in such things. When a doctor is sick there are all kinds of suspicions, all kinds of proverbial stigmas. Perhaps my patients will leave me like some Victorian country doctor implicated in a scandal. Outside in the garden the daffodils are bending and little snow-storms of blossom are being shaken from the apple trees. My wife is having a baby. I think of this as something terrible, as if she is about to be torn in two. I should not have such preposterous thoughts. I sit in my slippers and cardigan by the window, propped up by cushions, waiting for the telephone.

  I don’t know if it was M. I really saw in my surgery. I don’t know if my wife really knows if it is Crawford’s child. I know very little.

  Uncle Laurie died when I was fourteen, of obesity and fatty degeneration. When we buried him I mourned for him no more—this was a mark of my admiration—than I did for Gus when we buried him in the rockery. I had thought he was happy, healthy, at peace. He needed no one’s grief. Only now do I see that he was slowly killing himself. All he had been was a brilliant surgeon, a first-rate physician; expert in his field. He was gorging himself to fill up the gaps. He was filling himself up because his life was empty.

  The Tunnel

  ALL THAT SPRING AND SUMMER Clancy and I lived on the third floor of the old grey-brick tenement block in what might have been—we never really knew—Deptford or Bermondsey, Rotherhithe or New Cross. It was cheap because the block was due for demolition in the autumn and all the tenants had notice to quit by September. Most of them had gone already, so that those who remained were like survivors camping in a ruin. The vacated rooms were broken into at night and became the sources of foul smells. The old cream paintwork of the stair-wells, which here and there had darkened like enormous nicotine stains, was daubed with aerosol slogans and obscenities, and all through that hot drought of a summer the dust and litter from the streets, old pages of newspapers and polythene bags found their way up the flights of stairs, even as far as the third floor.

  We didn’t mind. It was all we could afford. We even relished the way we scooped out for ourselves a little haven, oblivious of the squalor around us. We were very young; we had only just left school. We were absorbed with each other, and we didn’t think about what we’d do in a month’s time, or two months’, or when the winter came or we had to find somewhere else to live. We made love insatiably, the way very young people in love can. And when that summer arrived, endlessly sunny and hot, we thought of it as a blessing on ourselves, despite the dust and the smells, because it was possible to live quite well in that room, with its scant furniture, draughty windows and twin gas ring, so long as the weather was good. We even saved on the few clothes we had between us, because, most of the time, with the dirty windows up and the hot air swimming in from the street, we wore nothing at all.

  We had run away because that was the only way Clancy and I could go on seeing each other without Clancy’s parents stopping us. We hadn’t run far. Clancy’s parents lived in a big, elegant Regency house by the park in Greenwich, and we knew that by going a co
uple of miles away, into the kind of area they preferred to think didn’t exist, we’d be as safe as if we’d fled to the ends of the country. Clancy’s father was a sort of financial expert who acted in an advisory capacity to the government and knew people in the House of Lords, and her mother came from good, sound pedigreed stock. They were not the kind of people to drag the police into a hunt for their daughter. But it was not beyond them to employ some private agency to track us down. And this was one of the reasons why, despite the scorching weather, we seldom left our third floor room, and when we did we kept a sharp eye open for men in slow-moving cars hugging the kerb, who might suddenly pull up, leap out and bundle Clancy inside.

  Clancy’s family was small. There were only Clancy herself, her mother and father and an ageing uncle who lived in seclusion in an old manor house in Suffolk where Clancy had spent summers when she was small. Clancy’s father was obsessively proud of the fact that he was descended from a once noble line which could be traced back to the reign of Henry VIII; and—like Henry VIII himself—he had turned cold, as Clancy grew up, towards his wife and daughter because they were a perpetual reminder that he had no son. There was nothing, apparently, he could do to change this fact; but he was dead-set on preventing the only remaining eligible member of the family from being absorbed into the riff-raff.

  I only met Clancy’s mother and father once, and that was by accident one Saturday afternoon when Clancy had promised me her parents wouldn’t be back till late. I had gone to the house in Greenwich. We made love on Clancy’s bed, looked at her photo albums and listened to the Beach Boys. We were sitting under the vine in the conservatory and Clancy was urging me to sample her Dad’s stock of malt whisky, when her parents suddenly turned up, having changed their plans for the evening. Clancy’s father asked me in icy, eloquent tones who the hell I thought I was and told me to get out. It was as if my presence in the house had no connection whatsoever with Clancy, as if I were some random, alien intruder. He was a tall, poised, steel-haired man with an air of having had the way of dealing with such situations bred into him and of merely summoning it automatically when required. I remember thinking that he and Clancy’s mother, and perhaps Clancy too, belonged to some completely foreign world, a world that had ceased to exist long ago or perhaps had only ever existed in people’s minds; so that whenever I thought of Clancy’s parents, looking out from our tenement window, I had to make an effort to believe they were real.