Graham Swift - Learning to Swim - And Other Stories

This memory flashed through my mind as M. departed, but not in the usual way of such memories, as if you see everything again, through your own eyes. I seemed to be looking at myself, from the outside, as a young boy, just as in reality I was now looking at M.

I returned to my desk and sat down. “What on earth was all that about?” said my receptionist, coming in from the little office adjoining my surgery. The shouting must have penetrated almost to the waiting room. “It’s all right Susan. It’s okay. Give me a moment or so, would you, before you send the next one in.” She went out again. I sat at my desk for several minutes with my head in my hands. My surgery is built projecting back from the side of the house so that the rear windows of the house are visible, obliquely, from it. Similarly, by looking from the house one can see the windows of the surgery. I drew back the blinds above my desk and looked at the lit ground floor windows where I knew Barbara would be. I wanted her to appear. Then I drew a breath and pressed the buzzer on my desk which was a signal to call the next patient from the waiting room.

When surgery was over that evening I locked up at once and went straight through to my wife. I wanted to put my arms around her and hold her protectively. But somehow she forestalled me. “What’s the matter?” she said. She was standing in the hallway drying her hands with a kitchen towel. Perhaps I still looked agitated from my outburst with M. She came towards me. She guided me through to the living room. “Here, you sit down for a while, you don’t look so good.” I was so surprised by this that I let myself be led. During the early years of our marriage when it became clear that the difference in our ages would have its effect, my wife had sought a new interpretation of her role. She had seen herself, at some time in the future, as the younger, stronger partner, keeping a watchful, soothing eye over a busy, older husband, guarding him against the strains of over-work. I had resolved that she would never have the opportunity to do this. She motioned me towards a chair. I thought: This is ridiculous, it is some kind of trick. I am the doctor: She is saying I look unwell. It is I who was about to comfort her; it is she who needs rest. As she pressed me to sit down I suddenly thrust her hands off me. “I’m okay, for God’s sake.” She looked at me piercingly. “All right then,” she said, and her expression went grim and hollow.

Later that evening it struck me why it seemed I sometimes recognized M.’s face. His face was like the face of one of the corpses we had dissected in anatomy classes when I was a student. I remembered it because nearly all the corpses used by medical schools are of old people. I did not suffer myself from the attacks of squeamishness which afflict most medical students in the dissecting room. But this corpse, of a young, slim-built man, made me pause. The anatomy lecturer had joked about it. “Your age, eh Collins?”

It’s the same face, I thought. But I dismissed the notion from my mind.

Two or three days after that I received a telephone call which made my heart sink. It was from a young woman who said she was speaking on behalf of M. She said she had a room in the house in which M. lived. M. was ill. He had attracted the attention of other people in the building and given them my number. I thought: Of course, the inevitable ploy. Now he is forbidden my surgery. It was impossible to explain my position over the telephone, impossible, too, to say outright that I had no intention of visiting M. I said that I would try to fit in a call later that afternoon. It was then about eleven in the morning. In my anger I did not even go through the usual practice of asking for a description of symptoms.

“He seems bad, Doctor, don’t you think you should come at once?”

I was tempted to say, “It’s all an act, you stupid girl, don’t let him fool you,” but I didn’t. Her voice seemed genuinely imploring. I said, briskly, instead: “Look, I’m a busy man, I can’t come before four — all right?” And slammed the receiver down.

I had in fact several calls to make that day. Some were of a quite serious nature, none were, strictly, urgent. I knew I had a duty to deal with an emergency first. Some emergency! My only difficulty lay in deciding whether I should go to M.’s at all. I did not make up my mind until I had finished my other calls. Usually I like to complete my rounds by four so that I can have a moment’s peace before evening surgery at five. It was nearly a quarter past four when I turned the car round and headed in the direction of M.’s. I knew there could be unpleasant consquences for a doctor who refuses a call, even a false alarm, where third parties are concerned. I arrived at M.’s address — one of a row of large, ugly Victorian houses with basements — at about half-past. It was almost dark. More than one person seemed to be waiting for me as the door was opened: a girl with frizzed hair and glasses whom I took to be the telephone caller, a tall, laconic West Indian, a middle-aged man in a blue cardigan who appeared from a room at the rear, another woman, on the stairs, leaning over the banisters. I knew at once they were hostile. The woman on the stairs, who was furthest from view, spoke first:

“You’re too bloody late mate!”

The girl in glasses explained: “We called an ambulance.”

“You did what?”

“It left half an hour ago — we were really worried.”

“Well what was wrong for God’s sake?”

“ Now he asks,” said the West Indian, looking me up and down. “Five hours,” he added, “five fuckin’ hours for the doctor to come.”

I stood in the hallway in my overcoat, holding my doctor’s bag. I couldn’t help thinking that all this — even the ambulance — was still some pretence, a hoax, an elaborate conspiracy to continue M.’s fraud. I didn’t want to commit the error of finding it real. The hallway was dimly lit and unheated.

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.”