Graham Swift - Learning to Swim - And Other Stories

“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.