Graham Swift - Learning to Swim - And Other Stories

There was no need for either of us to seek reasons for this crude — and ineffective — outburst. I picked up an ash-tray. A glass ashtray. I wanted to throw it at her. But she said quietly: “Don’t be foolish. Don’t be a child.”

The white cliffs rear up on either inside of Cliffedge like watchful giants. Neil always loved to walk on the cliffs. Even on those early holidays he was always wandering from the safe sand to those extremities of the beach where the chalk towered and boulders strewed the water’s edge. Once he said, pointing to a less precipitous section where a sort of gully had been worn out, “There’s a path, let’s climb up.” But I have never seen the point of purposeless risks, of courting disaster. No, I said, as if to warn him.

And that last time, that last walk on the cliffs (past the coast-guard station, the plinth commemorating some nineteenth century wreck) I was as vigilant as ever, as dutiful as ever. No, Neil — away from the edge. But perhaps for one moment I relaxed my guard, perhaps I was thinking of other things: of Mary between the sheets with her medicinal lover; or perhaps I was looking down at the distant ribbon of the town, at the scraps of colour still littering the evening beach, at the sunlight catching the pier pavilion and the seafront hotels, and was thinking: It will only add spice to their holiday gaiety, it will only send a thrill through the sprawling crowds on the beach to learn of it. “Death Plunge,” Brothers in Seaside Tragedy.” Perhaps I shouldn’t have said to him, “Don’t you know how much you owe to me? Don’t you? ”

Mary left a month ago. I have brought too many forbidden things into her life and so broken our contract. But I know now that she has not left me out of contempt, out of cold-blooded rejection, but out of fear. She was frightened. Those first days after Neil’s death I cried like a baby. I had never cried in front of Mary before. And through my tears I saw in her face something more than intolerance or disgust — I saw horror.

But the inquest cleared me of suspicion. They declared an open verdict. They recognised that Neil was not an ordinary case, and that I had been like a father to him. I am free now. Free of a wife, and free, some would say, of a burdensome brother. But if I wished to be free of him, if I wished to be done with those repeated obligations, those repeated scenes he imposed on my life, why should I have returned, these last three weekends, to Cliffedge? To the same hotel, the same seafront, the same miniature but — as I know it now — far from simple world that has shadowed me from childhood?

I have been looking for Neil. That is why. I do not believe he is dead. He cannot have deserted me. Some day, by one of the familiar spots — the band-stand, the Harbour Café, the putting green — I will find him. He will be just one of the many “lost children” of the beach.

At night I do not seek ordinary company in pubs. I lie awake in the hotel room hoping to hear Neil murmur in his sleep. I feel so afraid. The gurgling of the pipes turns into the roar of great oceans. When I sleep I have this dream. I am alone in the boat. I am leaning over the side looking at my line disappearing into the water. I know that Neil is somewhere there in the depths and I will catch him. I start to pull in. A storm is brewing and the waves are rising up against the boat. I pull and pull so as to catch him in time. But the line is endless.

TELL ME, WHAT IS MORE magical, more sinister, more malign yet consoling, more expressive of the constancy — and fickleness — of fate than a clock? Think of the clock which is ticking now, behind you, above you, peeping from your cuff. Think of the watches which chirp blithely on the wrists of the newly dead. Think of those clocks which are prayed to so that their hands might never register some moment of doom — but they jerk forward nonetheless; or, conversely, of those clocks which are begged to hasten their movement so that some span of misery might reach its end, but they stubbornly refuse to budge. Think of those clocks, gently chiming on mantelpieces, which soothe one man and attack the nerves of another. And think of that clock, renowned in song, which when its old master died, stopped also, like a faithfull mastiff, never to go again. Is it so remarkable to imagine — as savages once did on first seeing them — that in these whirring, clicking mechanisms there lives a spirit, a power, a demon?

My family is — was — a family of clockmakers. Three generations ago, driven by political turmoils, they fled to England from the Polish city of Lublin, a city famous for its baroque buildings, for its cunning artifacts — for clocks. For two centuries the Krepskis fashioned the clocks of Lublin. But Krepski, it is claimed, is only a corruption of the German Krepf, and, trace back further my family line and you will find connections with the great horologers of Nuremberg and Prague. For my forefathers were no mere craftsmen, no mere technicians. Pale, myopic men they may have been, sitting in dim workshops, counting the money they made by keeping the local gentry punctual; but they were also sorcerers, men of mission. They shared a primitive but unshakeable faith that clocks and watches not only recorded time, but contained it — they spun it with their loom-like motion. That clocks, indeed, were the cause of time. That without their assiduous tick-tocking, present and future would never meet, oblivion would reign, and the world would vanish down its own gullet in some self-annihilating instant.

The man who regards his watch every so often, who thinks of time as something fixed and arranged, like a calendar, and not as a power to which is owed the very beating of his heart, may easily scoff. My family’s faith is not to be communicated by appeals to reason. And yet in our case there is one unique and clinching item of evidence, one undeniable and sacred repository of material proof.

No one can say why, of all my worthy ancestors, my great-grandfather Stanislaw should have been singled out. No one can determine what mysterious conjunction of influences, what gatherings of instinct, knowledge and skill made the moment propitious. But on a September day, in Lublin, in 1809, my great-grandfather made the breakthrough which to the clockmaker is as the elixir to the alchemist. He created a clock which would not only function perpetually without winding, but from which time itself, that invisible yet palpable essence, could actually be gleaned — by contact, by proximity — like some form of magnetic charge. So, at least, it proved. The properties of this clock — or large pocket-watch, to be precise, for its benefits necessitated that it be easily carried — were not immediately observable. My great-grandfather had only an uncanny intuition. In his diary for that September day he writes cryptically: “The new watch — I know, feel it in my blood — it is the one. ” Thereafter, at weekly intervals, the same entry: “The new watch — not yet wound.” The weekly interval lapses into a monthly one. Then, on September 3rd, 1810—the exact anniversary of the watch’s birth — the entry: “The Watch — a whole year without winding,” to which is added the mystical statement: “We shall live for ever.”

But this was not all. I write now in the 1970s. In 1809 my great-grandfather was forty-two. Simple arithmetic will indicate that we are dealing here with extraordinary longevity. My great-grandfather died in 1900—a man of one hundred and thirty-three, by this time an established and industrious clockmaker in one of the immigrant quarters of London. He was then, as a faded daguerrotype testifies, a man certainly old in appearance but not decrepit (you would have judged him perhaps a hale seventy), still on his feet and still busy at his trade; and he died not from senility but from being struck by an ill-managed horse-drawn omnibus while attempting one July day to cross Ludgate Hill. From this it will be seen that my great-grandfather’s watch did not confer immortality. It gave to those who had access to it a perhaps indefinite store of years; it was proof against age and against all those processes by which we are able to say that a man’s time runs out, but it was not proof against external accident. Witness the death of Juliusz, my great-grandfather’s first-born, killed by a Russian musket-ball in 1807. And Josef, the second-born, who came to a violent end in the troubles which forced my great-grandfather to flee his country.