Graham Swift - Learning to Swim - And Other Stories

And then it was almost light and rain was dashing against the window as if the house were plunging under water and a strange, small voice was calling from the front of the house — but it wasn’t Father’s voice. I got up, walked out onto the landing and peered through the landing window. The voice was a voice on the radio inside an ambulance which was parked with its doors open by the pavement. The heavy rain and the tossing branches of a rowan tree obscured my view, but I saw the two men in uniform carrying out the stretcher with a blanket draped over it. Ralph was with them. He was wearing his dressing gown and pyjamas and slippers over bare feet, and he carried an umbrella. He fussed around the ambulance men like an overseer directing the loading of some vital piece of cargo. He called something to Mother who must have been standing below, out of sight at the front door. I ran back across the landing. I wanted to get the acid. But then Mother came up the stairs. She was wearing her dressing gown. She caught me in her arms. I smelt whisky. She said: “Darling. Please, I’ll explain. Darling, darling.”

But she never did explain. All her life since then, I think, she has been trying to explain, or to avoid explaining. She only said: “Grandpa was old and ill, he wouldn’t have lived much longer anyway.” And there was the official verdict: suicide by swallowing prussic acid. but all the other things that should have been explained — or confessed — she never did explain.

And she wore, beneath everything, this look of relief, as if she had recovered from an illness. Only a week after Grandfather’s funeral she went into Grandfather’s bedroom and flung wide the windows. It was a brilliant, crisp late-November day and the leaves on the rowan tree were all gold. And she said: “There — isn’t that lovely?”

The day of Grandfather’s funeral had been such a day — hard, dazzling, spangled with early frost and gold leaves. We stood at the ceremony, Mother, Ralph and I, like a mock version of the trio — Grandfather, Mother and I — who had once stood at my father’s memorial service. Mother did not cry. She had not cried at all, even in the days before the funeral when the policemen and the officials from the coroner’s court came, writing down their statements, apologising for their intrusion and asking their questions.

They did not address their questions to me. Mother said: “He’s only ten, what can he know?” Though there were a thousand things I wanted to tell them — about how Mother banished Grandfather, about how suicide can be murder and how things don’t end — which made me feel that I was somehow under suspicion. I took the jar of acid from my bedroom, went to the park and threw it in the pond.

And then after the funeral, after the policemen and officials had gone, Mother and Ralph began to clear out the house and to remove the things from the shed. They tidied the overgrown parts of the garden and clipped back the trees. Ralph wore an old sweater which was far too small for him and I recognised it as one of Father’s. And Mother said: “We’re going to move to a new house soon — Ralph’s buying it.”

I had nowhere to go. I went down to the park and stood by the pond. Dead willow leaves floated on it. Beneath its surface was a bottle of acid and the wreck of my launch. But though things change they aren’t destroyed. It was there, by the pond, when dusk was gathering and it was almost time for the park gates to be locked, as I looked to the centre where my launch sank, then up again to the far side, that I saw him. He was standing in his black overcoat and his grey scarf. The air was very cold and little waves were running across the water. He was smiling, and I knew: The launch was still travelling over to him, unstoppable, unsinkable, along that invisible line. And his hands, his acid-marked hands, would reach out to receive it.

WHAT IS IT ABOUT THE sea that summons people to it? That beckons the idle to play and ponder at its skirts? What was it that built these ice-cream coloured colonies, these outposts of pleasure along the clifftops and shingle of the south coast? Pleasure of being on the brink? Pleasure in the precariousness of pleasure? How would they have become so strangely intense, so strangely all-in-all, these little worlds (the pier, the life-boat station, the aquarium) we once knew for two weeks out of every fifty-two, were it not for their being pressed against this sleeping monster, the sea?

We came here long ago, Neil and I. To — let me call it, for reasons of my own — Cliffedge. We arrived every August on the train with our parents. It had then the peculiar set-apart redolence of “holidays.” Foreign, enchanting, but not real. It might — it ought to — have remained no more than a memory, lingering yet fading, like the fading photographs taken at the time: the two of us buried up to our necks in sand; or splashing in the waves. Neil, two years my younger, the slighter, more angular, more excitable figure.

I could not have imagined that in fifteen, in twenty years’ time that world of salt and sunburn would not yet have passed into remembrance. That I would still be going with my brother, he thirty-three, I thirty-five, to the same resort; that I would buy him on the train, not lemonade and chocolate as Mother and Father did, but beer and cigarettes; that I would watch him — as if indeed I had taken over the former roles of my parents — on the clifftops, on the pebbles, playing his dangerous games.

I said to Mary: I have this brother who has never grown up. I have to take him every so often on outings and pleasure trips, even on holidays to the seaside. This is serious and necessary. What makes it serious is that unlike children when their pleasures are denied them, Neil does not merely throw tantrums. He threatens to kill himself. I was wary, apologetic. Mary frowned, looked momentarily grave, even a little aggrieved; then, putting her hand on mine, she gave her bright, slightly hard expression — an expression I have come to know so well, along with its secret meaning: I can look out for myself; there is no question of my ability. She squeezed my hand and smiled. Then she said, “I’m sure we can cope.” And that word, also, I have come to know well — to regard it almost as Mary’s motto and philosophy in a single sound: “Cope.”

That was years ago too, before we married. And Mary could not perhaps have known how deadly earnest I had been in my warnings. How what at first had seemed a trying if manageable obstacle, to be surmounted in time, became an irremovable burden. How her “coping” (for she never failed to cope) was to progress first to a kind of righteous detachment — It is your problem, I do not deserve to be impeded by it — then to the pitch where, when I would take Neil on his “holidays,” she too would take holidays of her own (it was unthinkable that the three of us could have gone away together); holidays which I was not slow to understand were spent in the company of her lover.

I remember one summer long ago at Cliffedge Neil wanted to take a trip on one of the boats the fishermen used for taking parties mackerel fishing. The weather was unfavourable — the sky overcast, the sea heaving sluggishly — but it was the last day of our holiday and my father (who, so I know now, had his own cause for reluctance) yielded. We set off. Beyond the shelter of the bay the swell became suddenly heavy, a squally wind slapped us. I became seasick. My father was grimly silent. Neil did not have the least qualm. He caught six mackerel that day, hauling them in on the end of the line the fisherman prepared. He leant well out of the boat, eyes on the taut nylon as it cut the water. As the boat began to pitch and roll his face became flushed with ferocious glee. I had this sudden feeling that I must look after Neil, that I must protect him. But at the same time nausea assailed me. I spent the rest of that fishing trip fighting my stomach — fighting too what I can only describe as fear of the waves —and when I finally spewed up, weak-legged, over the harbour wall, it was Neil who looked at me — his six bloody-gilled mackerel looped on a string — as if I needed protection.