Graham Swift - Learning to Swim - And Other Stories

I did not understand, you see, how you could live without fear. I was ignorant and naive.

But, more than this, I did not understand how Uncle Laurie, who had opened people up for a living, could retire (when I was nine), put away his instruments and devote himself thereafter to food and drink; how a man whose business had been with disease could ignore his own knowledge and the strictures of his doctor and grow fat, short-winded, red-faced and sedentary. Under the apple tree he looked perfectly at peace with the world. And this made me fear him more. He saw my fear. “What are you afraid of?” he said. And to my mother: “That boy will grow up a bundle of nerves unless you do something about it.”

But it was he who did something — that afternoon our cat died.

My mother had gone into the kitchen, discovered the body, thinking she was the first to do so, and returned at once to inform us all. Everyone wondered how to dispose of the corpse. I hung my head, but Uncle Laurie watched me. While the others fussed he said: “Come with me. We’ll dispose of him — leave the boy with me awhile.” And he got up slowly from his wicker chair, stubbing his cigar out irritably.

He led me into the garage and squeezed his bulk with difficulty alongside our car, to the work bench at the rear. He cleared some tools off the bench, placed a piece of oilcloth over the space and then a wooden board over the cloth. His arms were massive, but at the end of them were precise, agile fingers like a pianist’s. He fixed the car inspection-lamp, with its long flex, on the work bench in such a way that its light fell on the board, combined with the light from the rear garage window. “Now,” he said, “before the thing’s too stiff.” He waddled out of the garage and returned after a while bearing Gus in one arm and in the other a black leather bag containing scalpels, forceps and probes.

“You’re afraid of these things eh? Of dead animals? Watch.”

And then, in what seemed a mere handful of minutes, Uncle Laurie pinned the cat to the board, opened it up, pointed out to me its vital organs, demonstrated how it had lived, performed its functions and died — of a heart attack — briefly related the physiology of cats to that of human beings and gathered together the remains for burial.

He talked in a detached monotone, his face heavy and disinterested, as if his mind was on something else.

Throughout all this I was not allowed to turn my eyes from the foraging of the scalpel. My head was pushed forward so I would see better and miss nothing. I breathed Gus’s internal odours.

“You see, there is nothing to worry about when you know what is there and you know how it works.”

He gave a sort of satisfied grunt. Perhaps he was proud of his performance; though I did not see him smile. He wiped his instruments clean with a kind of ponderous disdain, as if, if he wished, he could put Gus’s parts together again, like a motor, and bring him back to life.

Later I saw him in the garden sucking a peach.

But I knew now why he could sit so contentedly under the trees, enjoying his cigar and the sunshine on his face, why he could make himself fat and breathless, careless of the consequences. You see, health is not the absence of but the disregard for disease.

That day I knew I would become a doctor.

I watch Mason moving behind the chink in the blinds in the surgery. I don’t know if I believe in ghosts. As a doctor, a man of science, it is not my business to believe in such things. When a doctor is sick there are all kinds of suspicions, all kinds of proverbial stigmas. Perhaps my patients will leave me like some Victorian country doctor implicated in a scandal. Outside in the garden the daffodils are bending and little snow-storms of blossom are being shaken from the apple trees. My wife is having a baby. I think of this as something terrible, as if she is about to be torn in two. I should not have such preposterous thoughts. I sit in my slippers and cardigan by the window, propped up by cushions, waiting for the telephone.

I don’t know if it was M. I really saw in my surgery. I don’t know if my wife really knows if it is Crawford’s child. I know very little.

Uncle Laurie died when I was fourteen, of obesity and fatty degeneration. When we buried him I mourned for him no more — this was a mark of my admiration — than I did for Gus when we buried him in the rockery. I had thought he was happy, healthy, at peace. He needed no one’s grief. Only now do I see that he was slowly killing himself. All he had been was a brilliant surgeon, a first-rate physician; expert in his field. He was gorging himself to fill up the gaps. He was filling himself up because his life was empty.

ALL THAT SPRING AND SUMMER Clancy and I lived on the third floor of the old grey-brick tenement block in what might have been — we never really knew — Deptford or Bermondsey, Rotherhithe or New Cross. It was cheap because the block was due for demolition in the autumn and all the tenants had notice to quit by September. Most of them had gone already, so that those who remained were like survivors camping in a ruin. The vacated rooms were broken into at night and became the sources of foul smells. The old cream paintwork of the stair-wells, which here and there had darkened like enormous nicotine stains, was daubed with aerosol slogans and obscenities, and all through that hot drought of a summer the dust and litter from the streets, old pages of newspapers and polythene bags found their way up the flights of stairs, even as far as the third floor.

We didn’t mind. It was all we could afford. We even relished the way we scooped out for ourselves a little haven, oblivious of the squalor around us. We were very young; we had only just left school. We were absorbed with each other, and we didn’t think about what we’d do in a month’s time, or two months’, or when the winter came or we had to find somewhere else to live. We made love insatiably, the way very young people in love can. And when that summer arrived, endlessly sunny and hot, we thought of it as a blessing on ourselves, despite the dust and the smells, because it was possible to live quite well in that room, with its scant furniture, draughty windows and twin gas ring, so long as the weather was good. We even saved on the few clothes we had between us, because, most of the time, with the dirty windows up and the hot air swimming in from the street, we wore nothing at all.

We had run away because that was the only way Clancy and I could go on seeing each other without Clancy’s parents stopping us. We hadn’t run far. Clancy’s parents lived in a big, elegant Regency house by the park in Greenwich, and we knew that by going a couple of miles away, into the kind of area they preferred to think didn’t exist, we’d be as safe as if we’d fled to the ends of the country. Clancy’s father was a sort of financial expert who acted in an advisory capacity to the government and knew people in the House of Lords, and her mother came from good, sound pedigreed stock. They were not the kind of people to drag the police into a hunt for their daughter. But it was not beyond them to employ some private agency to track us down. And this was one of the reasons why, despite the scorching weather, we seldom left our third floor room, and when we did we kept a sharp eye open for men in slow-moving cars hugging the kerb, who might suddenly pull up, leap out and bundle Clancy inside.

Clancy’s family was small. There were only Clancy herself, her mother and father and an ageing uncle who lived in seclusion in an old manor house in Suffolk where Clancy had spent summers when she was small. Clancy’s father was obsessively proud of the fact that he was descended from a once noble line which could be traced back to the reign of Henry VIII; and — like Henry VIII himself — he had turned cold, as Clancy grew up, towards his wife and daughter because they were a perpetual reminder that he had no son. There was nothing, apparently, he could do to change this fact; but he was dead-set on preventing the only remaining eligible member of the family from being absorbed into the riff-raff.