Graham Swift - Learning to Swim - And Other Stories

My staff, some of whom had seemed ready to leave as well, rallied round me now that they saw I was about to act. It was the morning of the couple’s fifth day at my hotel. I would have to speak to the man, as the — responsible party. My chambermaid had told me that every morning before they came down to breakfast — never earlier than nine-thirty — the girl took a bath in the bathroom on the landing (alas, not all my rooms had private baths) while the man remained in the room. This would be the best time to confront him.

At about nine the chambermaid informed me that the bathroom was occupied and the bath running. I wasn’t sure what I was going to say. I’d half prepared openings like “You must leave at once — I think you know why” or “You must leave at once — can’t you see what you’re doing to my business?”—but after that, what I felt I should say only got blurred and angry. I went up the stairs to number eleven. I was about to knock, loudly, on the door, but in the circumstances I dispensed with propriety, and opened it directly.

I’d expected, of course, to find the man. But they must have changed their routine with the bathroom that morning because I found the girl. The daughter. She was sitting at the dressing-table in a white nightdress with small pink flowers on it. She didn’t have her heavy make-up on; perhaps she was about to apply it. She looked incongruous in this position, like a child sitting before a grand piano. You see, she couldn’t have been more than fifteen. For the briefest instant she must have thought that I was her father, because when she looked up I got the impression of a cloud suddenly crossing a perfectly clear and peaceful face — as if I might have seen her for a fraction of a second without that habitual look of strain she wore in the public rooms of the hotel. I didn’t say anything because I couldn’t. I looked into that face. I have never seen a face which looked so guilty and so terrified. But it seemed to me that deep in that face, deep beneath its desperate surface, I saw happiness. It was like the glint of still water at the bottom of a dark well, like a beautiful, long-submerged memory. Just for one moment I thought I could put my hands on that girl’s neck and throttle her. A window was open and I could hear the weir.

Then I went down to my hotel office, shut the door and wept.

IN ISTANBUL THERE ARE TOMBS, faced with calligraphic designs, where the dead Sultan rests among the tiny catafalques of younger brothers whom he was obliged, by custom, to murder on his accession. Beauty becomes callous when it is set beside savagery. In the grounds of the Topkapi palace the tourists admire the turquoise tiles of the Harem, the Kiosks of the Sultans, and think of girls with sherbet, turbans, cushions, fountains. “So were they just kept here?” my wife asks. I read from the guide-book: “Though the Sultans kept theoretical power over the Harem, by the end of the sixteenth century these women effectively dominated the Sultans.”

It is cold. A chill wind blows from the Bosphorus. We had come on our trip in late March, expecting sunshine and mild heat, and found bright days rent by squalls and hail-storms. When it rains in Istanbul the narrow streets below the Bazaar become torrents, impossible to walk through, on which one expects to see, floating with the debris of the market, dead rats, bloated dogs, the washed up corpses of centuries. The Bazaar itself is a labyrinth with a history of fires. People have entered, they say, and not emerged.

From the grounds of the Topkapi the skyline of the city, like an array of upturned shields and spears, is unreal. The tourists murmur, pass on. Turbans, fountains; the quarters of the Eunuchs; the Pavilion of the Holy Mantle. Images out of the Arabian Nights. Then one discovers, as if stumbling oneself on the scene of the crime, in a glass case in a museum of robes, the spattered kaftan in which Sultan Oman II was assassinated. Rent by dagger thrusts from shoulder to hip. The thin linen fabric could be the corpse itself. The simple white garment, like a bathrobe, the blood-stains, like the brown stains on the gauze of a removed elastoplast, give you the momentary illusion that it is your gown lying there, lent to another, who is murdered in mistake for yourself.

We leave, towards the Blue Mosque, through the Imperial Gate, past the fountain of the Executioner. City of monuments and murder, in which cruelty seems ignored. There are cripples in the streets near the Bazaar, shuffling on leather pads, whom the tourists notice but the inhabitants do not. City of siege and massacre and magnificence. When Mehmet the Conqueror captured it in 1453 he gave it over to his men, as was the custom, for three days of pillage and slaughter; then set about building new monuments. These things are in the travel books. The English-speaking guides, not using their own language, tell them as if they had never happened. There are miniatures of Mehmet in the Topkapi Museum. A pale, smooth-skinned man, a patron of the arts, with a sensitive gaze and delicate eyebrows, holding a rose to his nostrils …

It was after I had been explaining to my wife from the guide-book, over lunch in a restaurant, about Mehmet’s rebuilding of the city, that we walked round a corner and saw a taxi — one of those metallic green taxis with black and yellow chequers down the side which cruise round Istanbul like turquoise sharks — drive with almost deliberate casualness into the legs of a man pushing a cart by the kerb. A slight crunch; the man fell, his legs at odd angles, clothes torn, and did not get up. Such things should not happen on holiday. They happen at home — people cluster round and stare — and you accommodate it because you know ordinary life includes such things. On holiday you want to be spared ordinary life.

But then it was not the fact of the accident for which we were unprepared but the reactions of the involved parties. The injured man looked as if he were to blame for having been injured. The taxi driver remained in his car as if his path had been deliberately blocked. People stopped on the pavement and gabbled, but seemed to be talking about something else. A policeman crossed from a traffic island. He had dark glasses and a peaked cap. The taxi driver got out of his car. They spoke languidly to each other and seemed both to have decided to ignore the man on the road. Beneath his dark glasses the policeman’s lips moved delicately and almost with a smile, as if he were smelling a flower. We walked on round the corner. I said to my wife, even though I knew she would disapprove of the joke: “That’s why there are so many cripples.”

Our hotel is in the new part of Istanbul, near the Hilton, overlooking the Bosphorus, across which there is a newly built bridge. Standing on the balcony you can look from Europe to Asia. Uskudar, on the other side, is associated with Florence Nightingale. There are few places in the world where, poised on one continent, you can gaze over a strip of water at another.

We had wanted something more exotic. No more Alpine chalets and villas in Spain. We needed yet another holiday, but a different holiday. We had had this need for eight years and it was a need we could afford. We felt we had suffered in the past and so required a perpetual convalescence. But this meant, in time, even our holidays lacked novelty; so we looked for somewhere more exotic. We thought of the East. We imagined a landscape of minarets and domes out of the Arabian Nights. However, I pointed out the political uncertainties of the Middle East to my wife. She is sensitive to such things, to even remote hints of calamity. In London bombs go off in the Hilton and restaurants in Mayfair. Because she has borne one disaster she feels she should be spared all others, and she looks upon me to be her guide in this.