Graham Swift - Learning to Swim - And Other Stories

All this we could survey at leisure, but because we were on the third floor, when you lay on the bed (which we did most of the time) and looked out of the window, you saw only the sky. When the good weather came we lifted up the sash window high and moved the bed according to the position of the gradually shifting rectangle of sunshine, so that we could sunbathe most of the day without ever going out. We turned nice and brown and I told Clancy she was getting more and more like the cinnamon-coloured South Sea girls Gauguin painted.

We would lie looking up at the blue sky. Now and then we’d see flights of pigeons and gulls, or swallows swooping high up. All day long we could hear the noise from the street, the demolition sites and the breakers’ yards, but after a while we got accustomed to it and scarcely noticed it. We could tell time was passing by the periods of commotion from the school playground. We joked about our bed being a desert island, and made up poems about ourselves and our room in the style of John Donne.

I began to wish that when we’d hastily packed and fled I’d brought more books with me. All I had was my life of Gauguin and Sonnets, Lyrics and Madrigals of the English Renaissance which I’d borrowed from my English master at school and never given back. I thought of my old English master, Mr. Boyle, a lot now. He had a passion for Elizabethan poetry which he vainly tried to transmit to members of the fourth and fifth year, who laughed at him, I amongst them, and spread rumours that he was queer. Then in my last year, after I’d met Clancy, I suddenly began to appreciate his poems, their airy lucidity and lack of consequence. I think Mr. Boyle thought all his efforts were at last rewarded. He pressed books on me and wrote fulsome comments on my work. And I longed to tell him it was all only because of Clancy, because she was light and lucid like the poems — because we’d lost our innocence together but kept it, because we’d made love one wet Thursday in a secluded part of Greenwich Park …

I read aloud from Mr. Boyle’s book, lying naked in the sunshine on the bed. I wondered if he could have foreseen its being read like this. Clancy wriggled at bits she liked. A lot of the poets were obscure, little known men with names like George Turberville and Thomas Vaux. We tried to imagine what they had looked like and who the mistresses were they wrote to, and where they fucked them, in four-posters or in cornfields. Then Clancy said: “No, they were probably not like that at all. They were probably cold, scheming men who wanted positions at court and wrote poems because it was the done thing.” She would say sudden sharp, shrewd things like this as if she couldn’t help it. And I knew she was right.

“Like your Dad, you mean,” I said.

“Yes.” Clancy laughed. Then I told her how her Dad reminded me of Henry VIII, and Clancy said there was an old hollow tree in Greenwich Park where Henry VIII fucked Anne Boleyn.

At night, because of the heat and because we hardly moved during the day and only tired ourselves by making love, we would often lie awake till dawn. Clancy would tell me about her uncle’s estate in Suffolk. There was a crumbly red-brick house with tall chimneys and a stable yard, a lawn, a walled orchard and a decaying garden with a wood at the end. Through the wood and across a stretch of heath was the tail of an estuary, winding up from the sea. Marshes, river walls and oyster beds; the smell of mud and salt. There was a tiny wooden jetty with two rowing boats moored to it which were beached high in the mud when the tide went out, and in hot weather, at low tide, the sun cooked the mud so that when the water returned it was warm and soupy for swimming. In the marshes there were shelduck and red-shanks — once she had seen an otter — and in the wood there were owls which you could hear hooting at night from the house.

When I listened to Clancy describing things in such detail I would be amazed by the fact that she’d done all these things, years ago, and I’d never even known she existed. And I’d long for the impossible — to have gone down those same paths with her, watched the same marsh birds, swum in the same muddy water when she and I were little more than infants. As she rambled on we’d hear the trains clacking to and fro along the railway. Once, just as she was talking about the owls in the wood we heard a ship hooting on the Thames. And for most of the night there’d be a strange mixture of noises from the tenement itself: radios and TVs and people arguing, an old man’s cough and the sound of bottles smashing, the noise the kids made invading the stairs and the yells and threats when somebody tried to drive them out. But we hardly let this bother us, and, even in that area of London, there came a time when, while Clancy babbled, you could imagine that outside there were mud-flats and marshes and meadows with dykes and sluice-gates; just as at other times, when we’d try to remember lines from Romeo and Juliet which we’d both done for “O” level, we’d try to imagine that instead of the scrap yards and junk tips there were the piazzas and bell-towers of Verona.

“What’s your uncle like?” I asked Clancy.

“He’s a randy old bastard who can’t do anything about it because he’s stuck in a wheel-chair.” Clancy smiled. “You’d like him, he’s like you.”

I said I didn’t have a wheel-chair.

“I didn’t mean that.”

“How old is he?”

“Seventy-three.”

“What’s he do?”

“In weather like this, he sits out in the orchard with this nurse in a bikini who brings him drinks. He used to paint a bit — watercolours — before his illness.”

I was lying on my front and Clancy was stroking the backs of my legs. I couldn’t imagine myself in a wheel-chair.

“How ill is he? Seriously?”

“Pretty ill. It’s the winters. It gets cold there. The house isn’t in such wonderful condition, you know.” I realised that Clancy was speaking as if of some future home. “He nearly died last winter.”

I pictured Clancy’s uncle sitting out in the orchard with his voluptuous attendant, enjoying perhaps his last summer.

I said, “Do you think he’s happy.”

“I think he’s happier now — since my aunt died — than he’s ever been. But then he’s an invalid.”

When Clancy became exhausted with talking about Suffolk she would ask me about Gauguin. I said he was a French stock-broker who gave up his job to be a painter. He left his wife and family and went to Tahiti, where he lived with a native girl, painted his greatest pictures and died, in poverty, of syphilis.

One day Clancy was gone a long while on one of her trips to the Post Office. I was worried. I thought her parents’ spies had swooped at last. But then she returned, sweating, with the money, a carrier-bag of shopping and a lumpy brown paper parcel. “Here,” she said, kissing me and taking off her blouse, “For you.” Inside the parcel there were six assorted pots of watercolour paint and a set of three brushes.

“You ought to be a painter,” Clancy said. And after a moment’s pause, “—or a poet.”

“But you shouldn’t have bought this. We need the money.”

“It’s my money.”

“But — I don’t know how to paint. I haven’t painted since I was a kid.”

“That doesn’t matter. You’ve got the feel for it. I can see. You ought to be an artist.”

I thought of explaining to Clancy that admiring an artist or two wasn’t the same as possessing their gifts.

“But what am I going to paint on? I’ve got nothing to paint on.”

Clancy quickly gulped down a mug of water from the sink and waved her hand. “There’s all that — and all that.” She pointed to two walls of the room from which the wallpaper had either been stripped back to the bare plaster or peeled of its own accord. “You can use the draining board as a palette. If you like, you can paint me.” And she pulled off the rest of her clothes and bounced onto the bed, hair tossed back, one knee raised, one arm extended.