Graham Swift - Learning to Swim - And Other Stories

I spent over three months in the hospital, from a time shortly after my mother died. The police picked me up on the street because I was shouting things out loud and alarming passers-by. They thought I was drunk or on some sort of drug. But when they found out neither was the case they took me to see Dr. Azim and his colleagues.

It’s strange that I should have been delivered at the hospital doors by the police, because at first so much of what was called my “therapy” seemed to resemble criminal investigation. It was as though I were a suspect and the important thing, to save everyone time and trouble, was for me to make a clean breast of it. The doctors would conduct little question-games, like interrogations, and when I failed to come up with the right answer, they would sigh disappointedly, pump me full of tranquilizers and wait for the next session. I seriously wondered if at a certain stage they would resort to tougher, harsher methods.

So it was a relief to myself as well as them when I said: “The fact is, I wanted to kill my mother.”

In one sense I don’t think this changed anything. Merely saying it. But my doctors seemed pleased and started to busy themselves on my behalf; and from that day my relations with them changed. They became more friendly, they started to take me, as it were, into their confidence. And from that day too I began to admire them.

Only one thing seemed to disappoint them, and that was the way I failed to give a satisfactory answer to their further question: “Why did you want to kill her? Didn’t you love her?”

It was the second part of it that upset me. My first instinct was to be angry with them. I loved her very much. But I saw how this would trap me. So I started to tell them how when my father left us, three years ago, Mother and I had to look after each other. How, considering everything, we were happy, and I was even rather glad (though I didn’t tell them this) that Father had gone. And when I got a bit older, I started to get these feelings, hard to explain, that mother wanted to do me harm. I got scared of her and angry with her, and then as the feelings got worse I started to wish she was dead. And then she really did die. She was knocked down in the High Street, by a car which, so they told me, was hardly going at any speed. But she died. I had to go to the hospital to identify her.

Then my doctors said, “But if you were frightened of your mother, if you thought she would do you harm, why didn’t you leave her?” I didn’t answer that. When things got to this point it would be time for one of my injections.

So I never told them exactly why I wanted to kill Mother, but perhaps what I did tell them gave them plenty to be getting on with, because, as I say, our relations improved. We would often talk about my “problem” as if we were talking about some third person who was not present. I stopped having my gabbling and shouting fits, or my sessions of weeping inconsolably because of my dead mother. I was told by Dr. Azim, who had taken charge of my case, that I was making progress. And I agreed.

Once I said to Dr. Azim: “So is that what it amounts to? I’ve been put in here — people think I’m mad — because I wished to kill my mother?”

Dr. Azim smiled and gave an expression which suggested that this was taking a naive view.

“No, it’s not your wish to kill your mother that’s brought you here. It’s your guilt about that wish.”

So I said to him: “Does that mean then that the answer would be to have your wish.”

He smiled again. He had a reassuring smile.

“It’s not as simple as that. There are wishes, and there are wishes …”

Then there followed a period of five or six weeks — which I still look upon as one of the sweetest in my life — when, with my main course of therapy over, I was required only to recover slowly, like any convalescent after an illness. It was summer and I spent a lot of time sitting on the hospital lawns, observing the other patients, talking to Dr. Azim, and thinking about this business of guilt and secret wishes.

It seems to me that there can scarcely be anyone walking the earth who doesn’t carry with him some measure of guilt; and that guilt is always the sign of some forbidden happiness. Somewhere inside everybody’s guilt is joy, and somewhere within everybody’s unhappy, guilt-ridden face is happiness. Perhaps there’s no way out of this. And yet there must be someone who will try to understand our guilt and not blame it; there must be places where we can go where our secret wishes can be uttered and our forbidden dreams catered for. There must, in a word, be care.

And then I felt privileged to be where I was, and very proud to have met Dr. Azim and his colleagues; and I had the feeling that perhaps every recovering inmate experiences, of being an honoured and fortunate guest. So perhaps it was then, and before that first walk out of the hospital gates, that the ambition was sown in me that would one day make me a hotel-keeper.

But don’t think I walked out of that hospital with a worked-out plan for something which, of course, was then quite beyond my reach. My efforts matured slowly. For many years I ran a small café, bought with the money mother left me — no different from countless other cafés. I made a point of getting to know my customers, of making them feel that they could talk to me and I would listen; and some of them appreciated this, though some of them took exception and never came back.

Don’t think, either, that a lot of time didn’t pass and a lot of living didn’t get done between the day I left the hospital and the day I opened my hotel. I got married. My wife helped me with the café and even put her money towards it. It’s true, our marriage didn’t work out. It wasn’t happy. But I’d learnt to take a balanced view of unhappiness. My wife — Carol — often told me that I treated her like a child; I patronised her, talking down to her. The strange thing was it seemed to me to be the other way round.

When we got divorced, I decided not to marry again. I bought a new café in a nicer suburb with rooms above it so it could be used as a guest-house. For a long time — until it began to pay — I ran this virtually single-handedly, which was hard work. But I was good at it. I had a natural flair, I’d discovered, for catering — cooking, making beds, attending to laundry — I’d learnt it in those years with Mother. I don’t think I was ever lonely, not having a wife. You’re never lonely in the café and guest-house business, with people to look after. After a while I could afford a couple of permanent staff, and this enabled me to take the odd half-day off — to visit Mother’s grave, to go to look up Dr. Azim, though I was saddened to learn that he had retired through ill-health, and his whereabouts were unknown.

So many years went by, dull, if busy, years on the face of it. But I always felt I was only waiting, marking time. My ambition of a hotel was crystallizing. And I knew there would come a time when that long period — over thirty years in all — between my leaving the hospital and owning my hotel would seem unimportant, a preparation, a mere journey between two points.

Because you see, if I haven’t made it clear already, my idea of a hotel wasn’t just the crowning of a career in catering, the next step up from high street café and small-time guest-house. It was a genuine idea. I had no interest in providing mere board and lodging, though, God knows, I could provide that. I wanted a hotel that would be like my old hospital without its department of health notices. A hotel — of happiness.

And at last, after waiting, saving and searching, I found it: a twelve-bedroomed establishment in a west country town, beside a river. The former proprietors, local people, seemed to have lacked imagination and failed to see its potential. Within five years I had transformed it into a haven where people came, summer and winter, for what I used to call — and many of my guests were taken by the phrase—“therapeutic visits.” I think it owed some of its success — which is not to be modest — to the presence of water. The restaurant looked out across a lawn with white painted chairs and tables to the river, and there was not a room in the building in which could not be heard the soft rushing of a nearby weir. People like to be near water. It gives them a feeling of being cleansed, of being purified.