Graham Swift - Learning to Swim - And Other Stories

“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.

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.