Graham Swift - Learning to Swim - And Other Stories

I only met Clancy’s mother and father once, and that was by accident one Saturday afternoon when Clancy had promised me her parents wouldn’t be back till late. I had gone to the house in Greenwich. We made love on Clancy’s bed, looked at her photo albums and listened to the Beach Boys. We were sitting under the vine in the conservatory and Clancy was urging me to sample her Dad’s stock of malt whisky, when her parents suddenly turned up, having changed their plans for the evening. Clancy’s father asked me in icy, eloquent tones who the hell I thought I was and told me to get out. It was as if my presence in the house had no connection whatsoever with Clancy, as if I were some random, alien intruder. He was a tall, poised, steel-haired man with an air of having had the way of dealing with such situations bred into him and of merely summoning it automatically when required. I remember thinking that he and Clancy’s mother, and perhaps Clancy too, belonged to some completely foreign world, a world that had ceased to exist long ago or perhaps had only ever existed in people’s minds; so that whenever I thought of Clancy’s parents, looking out from our tenement window, I had to make an effort to believe they were real.

My own parents were no obstacle to us. They had had me late in life, so there was a big gap between our ages, which, oddly enough, smoothed our relations. They did not care what I did with my life. They had a council house in Woolwich and no shining example to set me. I’d gone to a large comprehensive; Clancy had gone to a classy girls’ school in Blackheath; and we might never have known each other if it wasn’t for Eddy, a big, hulking, raw-faced boy, who later joined the Royal Artillery, who told me in his matter-of-fact way that he had robbed two girls from Clancy’s school of their virginity; and urged me to do the same. With rather less swagger, I followed Eddy’s bidding (“Tell them they’ll thank you for it afterwards”), but, unlike Eddy, I found the initial conquest wasn’t an end in itself.

Clancy’s parents soon found out — Clancy had a knack of defiant truthfulness. I don’t know what outraged them more: the knowledge that their daughter was no longer intact and the possible scandal of some schoolgirl pregnancy — or the mere fact that Clancy associated with a boy from a council estate. I knew what I would say to Clancy’s father if I ever had to face him. I would repeat to him something I’d read in the letters of Gauguin (my favourite artist at that time and the only artist I knew anything about). Gauguin says somewhere that the Tahitians believed, unlike Europeans, that young people fall in love with each other because they have made love, not the other way round. I would explain that Clancy and I were good, regular Tahitians. But when the opportunity arose that Saturday afternoon — despite the sun shining through the vine leaves in the conservatory and Clancy’s thin summer dress and the malt whisky in my head — Gauguin’s South Sea paradise, which was only an image for what I felt for Clancy, paled before the cold aplomb of her father.

But Clancy’s uncle did not share the parental disdain. This I discovered in about our third week in the tenement. Clancy had to go out now and then to draw money from her Post Office account, which was our sole source of income at that time. One day she returned with, of all things, a letter from her uncle. Apparently, she had written to him, explaining everything, confident of his trust, immediately after our flight, but for complete security had not given an address and had asked him to reply via a Post Office in New Cross. Clancy showed me the letter. It was written in a shaky hand and was full of fond platitudes and breezy assurances, with a certain wry relish about them, to the effect that Clancy had enough sense now to lead her own life.

I said: “If he’s so much on our side, why don’t we go to him?” And I had a momentary vision, in Bermondsey, of dappled Constable landscapes.

“That’s just where they’ll look for us first.”

“But he won’t tell them that you’ve got in touch.”

“No.”

And then Clancy explained about her uncle.

He had always had a soft spot for her and she for him, since the days when she used to play muddy, rebellious games round his estate in the summer. As she grew up (her uncle lost his wife and his health declined), it became clear that there were strong temperamental differences between him and her parents. He did not care for her father’s sense of dignity or for his precious concern for the family name. He would be quite happy, he said, to sink heirless beneath the Suffolk soil. And he disapproved of the way Clancy was being rigorously groomed for some sort of outmoded high society.

“So you see,” said Clancy, putting away the letter, “I had to tell him, didn’t I? It’s just what he’d want.”

She kissed the folded notepaper.

“And another thing”—she got up, pausing deliberately before she went on. “I know for a fact when Uncle dies I’ll get everything; he won’t leave a thing to Mum and Dad. So you see — we’re all right.”

She said this with a kind of triumph. I realised it was an announcement she must have been saving up till the right moment, in order to make me glad. But I wasn’t glad — though I put on a pleased expression. I’d never really reflected that this was what Clancy’s background meant — the possibility of rich legacies, and I had never seen myself as a story-book adventurer who, having committed a daring elopement, would also gain a fortune. Nevertheless, it wasn’t these things which disturbed me and (for the first time) cast a brief shadow over my life with Clancy. It was something else, something I couldn’t understand. Clancy stood, smiling and pleased, at the window with the sun coming in behind her. She was wearing jeans and one of those tops made from gauzy, flimsy materials which she liked, I think, precisely because when she stood in front of the light you could see through them. It was the first fine weather of the spring, the first time we had been able to lift up our window wide to let some of the stinking air from inside out and some of the less stinking air from outside in. We’d been living together for three weeks, fugitives in a slum. The way happiness comes, I thought, is as important as the happiness itself.

From our tenement window you could see all that was ugly about that part of London. Directly opposite, across the road, was a junior school — high arched neo-Gothic windows, blackened brickwork, a pot-holed asphalt playground surrounded by a wall with wire netting on top — which, like the tenement, was due to be pulled down at the end of the summer. It stood at the edge of an area, to the left as we looked from the window, which had already been demolished or was in the process of being demolished. Everywhere there were contractors’ hoardings, heaps of ruined masonry and grey corrugated metal fencing. Old blocks of terraced houses got turned into brick-coloured wildernesses over which dogs prowled and paths got trodden where people took short cuts. To the right, on the other side of the school, there was an odd, inexplicable path of worn grass with a stunted tree and a bench on it, and beyond that, on the other side of a side street with a few tattered shops, was another wasteland — of scrap yards, builders’ yards, half defunct factories and fenced-off sites which seemed to be depositories for cumbersome, utterly useless articles: heaps of car axles from which the oil ran in black pools, stacks of rusted oil drums, even a pile of abandoned shop-window dummies, their arms and legs sticking up like some vision from Auschwitz. Beyond this was the railway line to London Bridge on its brick arches, the tower blocks, precincts and flimsy estates which had sprouted from previous demolitions; while if you looked far round to the right you could see the nodding antennae of cranes by the Thames.