Graham Swift - Learning to Swim - And Other Stories

He blinked.

“Come on, off with you.”

He got up. I was stern. But, in speaking to him in that confiding way, I realized that I had admitted that he had got under my skin, that he affected me, that my relations with him were different — more intimate and involved — from my relations with other patients. At the door he looked up, almost with satisfaction. My palms sweated. His features had this flat quality, as if there was nothing behind them. And suddenly I knew why he fostered and cherished his “pains,” why he manufactured little upheavals and crises in his body, why he needed these amateur dramatics in my surgery: He was getting his experience.

That night my wife could not sleep. She had a mild pregnancy ailment for which I had had tablets prescribed. We lay awake in the dark. I said to her (this was a question I had been asking her, silently, ever since we knew she was pregnant, but now I spoke it aloud): “Whose child is it?” “How do I know?” she said. And yet I knew she knew. Perhaps she was not saying, to protect me, to propitiate me; or — if it was my child — to punish me. She turned onto her side. I put my hand gently on her belly.

I met my wife when she was twenty-two and I was forty-one and had just become a partner in the practice which I run now by myself. I had trained and worked for twenty years in the hectic world of hospitals and acquired something of a reputation; but it was never my aim to become eminent in medicine, to devote myself exclusively or academically. One day I wanted to take up a practice which I could manage without hardship, where I would be free to enjoy life. I would enjoy life. I had a taste, a zest for it. My medical knowledge would ensure this — you see, it was always for me a matter of health, of happiness. And when I took up this practice it would be time for me to marry. My wife would be young, sensual, free, full of life. She would make up for some of the sacrifices, for some of the constraints that go with serving medicine.

Barbara was these things. Though she had also, I imagined, an appearance of being vulnerable, of needing to be protected, of being in some ways, despite her twenty-two years, still a child. She worked in the Haematology Unit at St. Leonard’s. I have always had a special interest in haematology. This is because once I was frightened by blood. I used to be scared of the sight of it. Barbara had been at St. Leonard’s for a year, after graduating. Within eighteen months we married. Perhaps I wooed her in an old-fashioned manner. By showing her the solid things I had to offer: the house with its adjoining surgery which Dr. Bailey (a man who had studied under my great-uncle at Bart’s) would offer me when he retired and I took on his practice; the garden with its apple trees; my professional standing; my knowledge. Perhaps it was she who looked to me for a widening of experience. She was playful, energetic, capricious and I wanted to share these things as an equal. But I found myself falling into the role of the older man whose dignity is being teased, tempted. We went on our honeymoon to Italy. We made love in a room with bleached shutters overlooking the Gulf of Sorrento. And yet after this I knew it was not to be as I had foreseen. I did not let this trouble me; I have learnt not to let things trouble me, to accept what is so. I regarded my wife’s youth as perfectly natural, perfectly right, even if I could not wholly reciprocate it. I began to look on her as a father looks on a daughter: Her pleasure was my pleasure; I was there to advise her, to safeguard her pleasure, to protect it from what risks it might incur, to ensure her health. I did not want to restrain her. We started to divide off the surgery and the house as separate territories so as not to impose on each other. Perhaps she became jealous of my patients because the attention I gave them was in a way similar to that I gave her. Yet I believe I was considerate to her, as I was to my patients. I would think of all I had; I had every reason to be thankful. I would look at my wife, as she prepared herself, her hair up, for an evening with friends or as she stepped, laden with carrier bags, from the car I bought her (only sometimes would I tell myself, these visions are like photographs whose real subject you do not touch — but I did not let this trouble me), and I would think: I am a happy man, a really happy man. And then I began to want a child.

I knew she was having an affair with Crawford. He was the new head of the Haematology Unit. Only thirty-two. I was not angry, or recriminatory. I don’t believe in making suffering. I thought: This is natural and excusable; she must have this adventure; she must have her experience. The best treatment is to let it run its course. When it is over she will come back to me and our relations will be stronger, more cheerful. I was not even jealous of Crawford. He was a non-medic, like most of the staff in research departments. He had all the non-medic’s sense of a subject seen in academic isolation away from its human bearing. He was a rather slight, unprepossessing man — if sixteen years my younger. His affair with Barbara lasted through that summer, and ended in August. I do not know if he broke it off or whether they put an end to things mutually because they felt guilty at what they were doing to me. Or to Crawford’s wife. Later I learnt that Crawford was accepting a job in Canada in the new year. Barbara took the break-up badly; she even cried in front of me and blamed me. I thought: This is to be expected, it will heal; life begins again. They had terminated the affair just before she and I went on our summer holiday, in the west of Ireland. Often I would leave her in our room and I would go for strolls along the beach or over the golf links, breathing the clean air with gratitude.

Then, when we returned, we learnt that she was pregnant.

I put my hand gingerly on her belly. When you feel the belly of a pregnant woman you can tell all sorts of things about the child she carries. Except whose it is.

“Tell me,” I said.

“I don’t know, I don’t know.”

I thought: All this is perhaps a pretence, to create drama.

“If you tell me, I will understand. Either way.”

She did not answer. It was as though she was far away. She was hunched up beneath the bedclothes, gathered into herself, like the foetus inside her.

After a long pause she said: “What will you understand?”

A few days later, when M. appeared in my surgery, I turned upon him furiously. I refused to treat him. I had not meant to behave like this. But at the sight of his helpless face something exploded inside me. It was no longer a case of professional annoyance. I felt I must be free of him as one feels sometimes one must break off a harmful relationship, sever a tie one should never have begun. “Out!” I said, “I’ve had enough! Out!” He looked at me with a kind of ingenuous disbelief. This made me all the more severe. “Out! I don’t want to see you again!” I could feel my face was flushed and I was losing control. “But — my pain is real , Doctor,” he reiterated his old cry. “No, your pain is not real,” I said emphatically. “If it were real, you would not be concerned whether it were real or not.” This made me feel more in command. One of my hands was on M.’s shoulder pressing him towards the door. I opened it and all but pushed him out. “Go, will you? I don’t want to see you again!”

It was a dark evening in mid-winter. A light over my surgery door lit up the gravel path. He walked away, but paused momentarily, after three or four steps, to look back at me over his shoulder. And as he did so I suddenly had a strange, intense memory from when I was a boy. I was no more than eleven. It was one warm summer Sunday when all the family was in the garden. I had gone indoors into the kitchen for some reason and found our old tom cat Gus dead on the floor. It was lying on the tiles with its legs straight out beside it. I knew it was dead, but I had never encountered death in such a tangible form before. I was frightened. But what frightened me was not so much the dead cat itself but the fact that I was the first to discover it, so that in some way its death was tied up with me, I had responsibilities towards it. I did not know what to do. I simply retreated into the garden, pretending to have seen nothing and trying to hide my state of mind, till someone else made the discovery. But, as I crept out of the kitchen door and down the side path, I had looked back, involuntarily, as if in some way the dead cat might rise up to expose my guilt and cowardice, like the ghost of a murdered corpse.