Learning to Swim: And Other Stories

  My own parents were no obstacle to us. They had had me late in life, so there was a big gap between our ages, which, oddly enough, smoothed our relations. They did not care what I did with my life. They had a council house in Woolwich and no shining example to set me. I’d gone to a large comprehensive; Clancy had gone to a classy girls’ school in Blackheath; and we might never have known each other if it wasn’t for Eddy, a big, hulking, raw-faced boy, who later joined the Royal Artillery, who told me in his matter-of-fact way that he had robbed two girls from Clancy’s school of their virginity; and urged me to do the same. With rather less swagger, I followed Eddy’s bidding (“Tell them they’ll thank you for it afterwards”), but, unlike Eddy, I found the initial conquest wasn’t an end in itself.

  Clancy’s parents soon found out—Clancy had a knack of defiant truthfulness. I don’t know what outraged them more: the knowledge that their daughter was no longer intact and the possible scandal of some schoolgirl pregnancy—or the mere fact that Clancy associated with a boy from a council estate. I knew what I would say to Clancy’s father if I ever had to face him. I would repeat to him something I’d read in the letters of Gauguin (my favourite artist at that time and the only artist I knew anything about). Gauguin says somewhere that the Tahitians believed, unlike Europeans, that young people fall in love with each other because they have made love, not the other way round. I would explain that Clancy and I were good, regular Tahitians. But when the opportunity arose that Saturday afternoon—despite the sun shining through the vine leaves in the conservatory and Clancy’s thin summer dress and the malt whisky in my head—Gauguin’s South Sea paradise, which was only an image for what I felt for Clancy, paled before the cold aplomb of her father.

  But Clancy’s uncle did not share the parental disdain. This I discovered in about our third week in the tenement. Clancy had to go out now and then to draw money from her Post Office account, which was our sole source of income at that time. One day she returned with, of all things, a letter from her uncle. Apparently, she had written to him, explaining everything, confident of his trust, immediately after our flight, but for complete security had not given an address and had asked him to reply via a Post Office in New Cross. Clancy showed me the letter. It was written in a shaky hand and was full of fond platitudes and breezy assurances, with a certain wry relish about them, to the effect that Clancy had enough sense now to lead her own life.

  I said: “If he’s so much on our side, why don’t we go to him?” And I had a momentary vision, in Bermondsey, of dappled Constable landscapes.

  “That’s just where they’ll look for us first.”

  “But he won’t tell them that you’ve got in touch.”

  “No.”

  And then Clancy explained about her uncle.

  He had always had a soft spot for her and she for him, since the days when she used to play muddy, rebellious games round his estate in the summer. As she grew up (her uncle lost his wife and his health declined), it became clear that there were strong temperamental differences between him and her parents. He did not care for her father’s sense of dignity or for his precious concern for the family name. He would be quite happy, he said, to sink heirless beneath the Suffolk soil. And he disapproved of the way Clancy was being rigorously groomed for some sort of outmoded high society.

  “So you see,” said Clancy, putting away the letter, “I had to tell him, didn’t I? It’s just what he’d want.”

  She kissed the folded notepaper.

  “And another thing”—she got up, pausing deliberately before she went on. “I know for a fact when Uncle dies I’ll get everything; he won’t leave a thing to Mum and Dad. So you see—we’re all right.”

  She said this with a kind of triumph. I realised it was an announcement she must have been saving up till the right moment, in order to make me glad. But I wasn’t glad—though I put on a pleased expression. I’d never really reflected that this was what Clancy’s background meant—the possibility of rich legacies, and I had never seen myself as a story-book adventurer who, having committed a daring elopement, would also gain a fortune. Nevertheless, it wasn’t these things which disturbed me and (for the first time) cast a brief shadow over my life with Clancy. It was something else, something I couldn’t understand. Clancy stood, smiling and pleased, at the window with the sun coming in behind her. She was wearing jeans and one of those tops made from gauzy, flimsy materials which she liked, I think, precisely because when she stood in front of the light you could see through them. It was the first fine weather of the spring, the first time we had been able to lift up our window wide to let some of the stinking air from inside out and some of the less stinking air from outside in. We’d been living together for three weeks, fugitives in a slum. The way happiness comes, I thought, is as important as the happiness itself.

  From our tenement window you could see all that was ugly about that part of London. Directly opposite, across the road, was a junior school—high arched neo-Gothic windows, blackened brickwork, a pot-holed asphalt playground surrounded by a wall with wire netting on top—which, like the tenement, was due to be pulled down at the end of the summer. It stood at the edge of an area, to the left as we looked from the window, which had already been demolished or was in the process of being demolished. Everywhere there were contractors’ hoardings, heaps of ruined masonry and grey corrugated metal fencing. Old blocks of terraced houses got turned into brick-coloured wildernesses over which dogs prowled and paths got trodden where people took short cuts. To the right, on the other side of the school, there was an odd, inexplicable path of worn grass with a stunted tree and a bench on it, and beyond that, on the other side of a side street with a few tattered shops, was another wasteland—of scrap yards, builders’ yards, half defunct factories and fenced-off sites which seemed to be depositories for cumbersome, utterly useless articles: heaps of car axles from which the oil ran in black pools, stacks of rusted oil drums, even a pile of abandoned shop-window dummies, their arms and legs sticking up like some vision from Auschwitz. Beyond this was the railway line to London Bridge on its brick arches, the tower blocks, precincts and flimsy estates which had sprouted from previous demolitions; while if you looked far round to the right you could see the nodding antennae of cranes by the Thames.

  All this we could survey at leisure, but because we were on the third floor, when you lay on the bed (which we did most of the time) and looked out of the window, you saw only the sky. When the good weather came we lifted up the sash window high and moved the bed according to the position of the gradually shifting rectangle of sunshine, so that we could sunbathe most of the day without ever going out. We turned nice and brown and I told Clancy she was getting more and more like the cinnamon-coloured South Sea girls Gauguin painted.

  We would lie looking up at the blue sky. Now and then we’d see flights of pigeons and gulls, or swallows swooping high up. All day long we could hear the noise from the street, the demolition sites and the breakers’ yards, but after a while we got accustomed to it and scarcely noticed it. We could tell time was passing by the periods of commotion from the school playground. We joked about our bed being a desert island, and made up poems about ourselves and our room in the style of John Donne.

  I began to wish that when we’d hastily packed and fled I’d brought more books with me. All I had was my life of Gauguin and Sonnets, Lyrics and Madrigals of the English Renaissance which I’d borrowed from my English master at school and never given back. I thought of my old English master, Mr. Boyle, a lot now. He had a passion for Elizabethan poetry which he vainly tried to transmit to members of the fourth and fifth year, who laughed at him, I amongst them, and spread rumours that he was queer. Then in my last year, after I’d met Clancy, I suddenly began to appreciate his poems, their airy lucidity and lack of consequence. I think Mr. Boyle thought all his efforts were at last rewarded. He pressed books on me and wrote fulsome comments on my work. And I longed to tell him it was all only because of Clancy, beca
use she was light and lucid like the poems—because we’d lost our innocence together but kept it, because we’d made love one wet Thursday in a secluded part of Greenwich Park …

  I read aloud from Mr. Boyle’s book, lying naked in the sunshine on the bed. I wondered if he could have foreseen its being read like this. Clancy wriggled at bits she liked. A lot of the poets were obscure, little known men with names like George Turberville and Thomas Vaux. We tried to imagine what they had looked like and who the mistresses were they wrote to, and where they fucked them, in four-posters or in cornfields. Then Clancy said: “No, they were probably not like that at all. They were probably cold, scheming men who wanted positions at court and wrote poems because it was the done thing.” She would say sudden sharp, shrewd things like this as if she couldn’t help it. And I knew she was right.

  “Like your Dad, you mean,” I said.

  “Yes.” Clancy laughed. Then I told her how her Dad reminded me of Henry VIII, and Clancy said there was an old hollow tree in Greenwich Park where Henry VIII fucked Anne Boleyn.

  At night, because of the heat and because we hardly moved during the day and only tired ourselves by making love, we would often lie awake till dawn. Clancy would tell me about her uncle’s estate in Suffolk. There was a crumbly red-brick house with tall chimneys and a stable yard, a lawn, a walled orchard and a decaying garden with a wood at the end. Through the wood and across a stretch of heath was the tail of an estuary, winding up from the sea. Marshes, river walls and oyster beds; the smell of mud and salt. There was a tiny wooden jetty with two rowing boats moored to it which were beached high in the mud when the tide went out, and in hot weather, at low tide, the sun cooked the mud so that when the water returned it was warm and soupy for swimming. In the marshes there were shelduck and red-shanks—once she had seen an otter—and in the wood there were owls which you could hear hooting at night from the house.

  When I listened to Clancy describing things in such detail I would be amazed by the fact that she’d done all these things, years ago, and I’d never even known she existed. And I’d long for the impossible—to have gone down those same paths with her, watched the same marsh birds, swum in the same muddy water when she and I were little more than infants. As she rambled on we’d hear the trains clacking to and fro along the railway. Once, just as she was talking about the owls in the wood we heard a ship hooting on the Thames. And for most of the night there’d be a strange mixture of noises from the tenement itself: radios and TVs and people arguing, an old man’s cough and the sound of bottles smashing, the noise the kids made invading the stairs and the yells and threats when somebody tried to drive them out. But we hardly let this bother us, and, even in that area of London, there came a time when, while Clancy babbled, you could imagine that outside there were mud-flats and marshes and meadows with dykes and sluice-gates; just as at other times, when we’d try to remember lines from Romeo and Juliet which we’d both done for “O” level, we’d try to imagine that instead of the scrap yards and junk tips there were the piazzas and bell-towers of Verona.

  “What’s your uncle like?” I asked Clancy.

  “He’s a randy old bastard who can’t do anything about it because he’s stuck in a wheel-chair.” Clancy smiled. “You’d like him, he’s like you.”

  I said I didn’t have a wheel-chair.

  “I didn’t mean that.”

  “How old is he?”

  “Seventy-three.”

  “What’s he do?”

  “In weather like this, he sits out in the orchard with this nurse in a bikini who brings him drinks. He used to paint a bit—watercolours—before his illness.”

  I was lying on my front and Clancy was stroking the backs of my legs. I couldn’t imagine myself in a wheel-chair.

  “How ill is he? Seriously?”

  “Pretty ill. It’s the winters. It gets cold there. The house isn’t in such wonderful condition, you know.” I realised that Clancy was speaking as if of some future home. “He nearly died last winter.”

  I pictured Clancy’s uncle sitting out in the orchard with his voluptuous attendant, enjoying perhaps his last summer.

  I said, “Do you think he’s happy.”

  “I think he’s happier now—since my aunt died—than he’s ever been. But then he’s an invalid.”

  When Clancy became exhausted with talking about Suffolk she would ask me about Gauguin. I said he was a French stock-broker who gave up his job to be a painter. He left his wife and family and went to Tahiti, where he lived with a native girl, painted his greatest pictures and died, in poverty, of syphilis.

  One day Clancy was gone a long while on one of her trips to the Post Office. I was worried. I thought her parents’ spies had swooped at last. But then she returned, sweating, with the money, a carrier-bag of shopping and a lumpy brown paper parcel. “Here,” she said, kissing me and taking off her blouse, “For you.” Inside the parcel there were six assorted pots of watercolour paint and a set of three brushes.

  “You ought to be a painter,” Clancy said. And after a moment’s pause, “—or a poet.”

  “But you shouldn’t have bought this. We need the money.”

  “It’s my money.”

  “But—I don’t know how to paint. I haven’t painted since I was a kid.”

  “That doesn’t matter. You’ve got the feel for it. I can see. You ought to be an artist.”

  I thought of explaining to Clancy that admiring an artist or two wasn’t the same as possessing their gifts.

  “But what am I going to paint on? I’ve got nothing to paint on.”

  Clancy quickly gulped down a mug of water from the sink and waved her hand. “There’s all that—and all that.” She pointed to two walls of the room from which the wallpaper had either been stripped back to the bare plaster or peeled of its own accord. “You can use the draining board as a palette. If you like, you can paint me.” And she pulled off the rest of her clothes and bounced onto the bed, hair tossed back, one knee raised, one arm extended.

  So I began to paint the walls of our room. I quickly forgot my initial doubts at Clancy’s whim and made up for them with gratitude. I suppose I was really flattered and touched by the idea Clancy had of me, which only corresponded to some idea I secretly nursed of myself, as an artist, producing wonders in some garret.

  My painting lacked skill, and the subjects were predictable—palm trees, paradisial fruits, lagoons, native girls in flowered sarongs, all stolen from Gauguin. But I knew what I was really painting and Clancy knew what I was really painting and what it meant. Each native girl was intended to be Clancy; and each one, it was true, was slightly less crude and ungainly than its predecessor, so that one day I really hoped to capture Clancy in paint. All through the early part of June I painted the first wall, while Clancy wrote to her uncle, describing my great talents and saying how few people truly understood life. To be happy and occupied seemed easy. You found a place of your own and made love. You rented a squalid room in Bermondsey and painted Polynesian scenes on the wall. Clancy’s more extravagant fancies didn’t seem to matter. Once she wrapped her arms round my neck as I cleaned my brush: “I had a letter from Uncle today. When we go to Suffolk you’ll paint there, and write poems, won’t you? All the painters painted there.” I didn’t answer this. As for being a poet, I didn’t get beyond Sonnets and Lyrics of the English Renaissance. I was content as we were.

  Then things changed. Nothing fundamental altered, but a host of minor things that had never bothered us before began to affect us. The dirt of our room and the smells of the tenement which we’d been heedless of up till then because we were preoccupied with each other, began to irritate us. This was odd because it was just at the time when I was transforming our little hole into a miniature Tahiti that we began to sense the filth around us. Before, we’d tipped all our rubbish, empty tin cans, milk cartons and vegetable peelings, into old grocery boxes till they overflowed, and we’d hardly noticed the stink or the swarms of flies. Now we bicker
ed over whose turn it was to carry the rubbish boxes down to the dustbins at street level. We felt our lack of changes of clothes, even though we seldom wore any. Before, we used to wash clothes, because it was cheaper than the launderette, in an old two-handled zinc tub we’d found propped under the sink; and we’d washed ourselves in the same way, one of us sitting in, laughing, while the other tipped water over us. Now Clancy began to hanker after showers and proper laundering. Somehow we stopped thinking the same things together and wanting to do the same things at the same time—make love, eat, sleep, talk—which had meant that in the past there was never any need for decisions or concessions. Now the slightest things became subjects for debate. We began to get insecure about being found out and dragged back to the homes we’d left, even though we’d survived for nearly three months; and at night the noises in the tenement, the scufflings and shouts on the stairs made us nervous. Clancy would start up, clutching herself—“What’s that?! What’s that?!”—as if the police or some mad killer were about to burst in at the door.

  Even the endless sunshine, which was such a blessing to us, began to feel stale and oppressive.

  We were aware at least of one, unspoken reason for all this. Our money was dwindling. The figures in Clancy’s Post Office book were getting smaller and smaller and the time was coming when we’d have to get jobs. We’d both understood that this would happen sooner or later. It wasn’t so much the having to work that depressed us, but the thought that this would change us. We wanted to believe we could go out to work and still keep our desert island intact. But we knew, underneath, that work would turn us into the sort of creatures who went to work: puppets who only owned half their lives—and we’d anticipated this by stiffening already and becoming estranged from each other. Maybe this was a sort of defeatism. Clancy started looking at the job columns in newspapers. We’d existed quite happily before without newspapers. It was a sign of how different things were that I’d watch her for some time sitting with the pages spread in front of her, before asking the needless question: “What are you doing?”