Graham Swift: Learning to Swim: And Other Stories

He was wrong. I did not marry to beget children (that fact was to be my undoing) nor to sell my soul to Time. I married simply to have another human being to talk to other than my grandfather.

Do not mistake me. I did not wish to abandon him. I had no intention of giving up my place beside him in the Krepski workshop or of forfeiting my share in the Watch. But consider the weight of his hundred and fifty years on my forty-odd. Consider that since the age of three, not having known my father and, barely, my mother, I had been brought up by this prodigy who even at my birth was over a hundred. Might I feel, in watered-down form, the oppressions and frustrations of my father? At twenty-five I had already grown tired of my grandfather’s somehow hollow accounts of the Polish uprisings of 1830, of exiled life in Paris, of the London of the 1850s and ’60s. I had begun to perceive that mixed with his blatant misogyny was a more general, brooding misanthropy — a contempt for the common run of men who lived out their meagre three score and ten. His eyes (one of which was permanently out of true from the constant use of a clockmaker’s eye-piece) had developed a dull, sanctimonious stare. About his person there hung, like some sick-room smell infesting his clothes, an air of stagnancy, ill-humour, isolation, and even, to judge from his frayed jackets and the disrepair of his Highgate home — relative penury.

For what had become of “Krepski and Krepski, Clock and Watchmakers of Repute,” in the course of my lifetime? It was no longer the thriving East End workshop, employing six skilled craftsmen and three apprentices, it had been at the turn of the century. Economic changes had dealt it blows. The mass production of wrist-watches which were now two-a-penny and cheap electrical (electrical!) clocks had squeezed out the small business. On top of this was my grandfather’s ever-increasing suspiciousness of nature. For, even if lack of money had not forced him to do so, he would have gradually dismissed his faithful workmen for fear they might discover the secret of the Watch and betray it to the world. That watch could prolong human life but not the life of commercial enterprise. By the 1950s Krepski and Krepski was no more than one of those grimy, tiny, Dickensian-looking shops one can still see on the fringes of the City, sign-boarded “Watch and Clock Repairers” but looking more like a run-down pawn-broker’s — to which aged customers would, very occasionally, bring the odd ancient mechanism for a “seeing to.”

Grandfather was a hundred and fifty. He looked like a sour-minded but able-bodied man of half that age. Had he retired at the customary time (that is, some time during the 1860s or ’70s) he would have known the satisfaction of passing on a business at the peak of its success and of enjoying a comfortable “old age.” In the 1950s, still a fit man, he had no choice but to continue at the grinding task of scraping a living. Even had he retired and I had managed to support him, he would have returned, surely enough, to the shop on Goswell Road, like a dog to its kennel.

Imagine the companionship of this man — in our poky, draughty place of work which vibrated ceaselessly to the rumblings of the City traffic outside; in the Highgate house with its flaking paintwork, damp walls and cracked crockery, and only the growlings of Mrs. Murdoch, the housekeeper, to break the monotony. Was I to be blamed for flying with relief from this emtombment to the arms of an impulsive, bright-minded, plumply attractive schoolteacher who — at thirty-five — was actually perturbed by the way the years were passing her by?

• • •

Ah, but in that last fact lay the seeds of marital catastrophe. Grandfather was right. A true Krepski, a true guardian of the Watch, should marry, if he is to marry at all, a plain, stupid and barren wife. Deborah was none of these things: She was that volatile phenomenon, a woman at what for women is a dangerous age, suddenly blessed with the prospect of womanhood fulfilled. Shall I describe our union as merely connubial? Shall I offer the picture of myself as the sober, steady, semi-paternal figure (I was eight years her elder) taking under my sheltering wing this slightly delicate, slightly frightened creature? No. Those first months were a whirlwind, a vortex into which I was sucked, gently at first and then with accelerating and uninhibited voracity. The walls of our first floor flat shook to the onslaughts of female passion; they echoed to Deborah’s screams (for at the height of ecstasy Deborah would scream, at an ear-splitting pitch). And I, an, at first, unwitting and passive instrument to all this, a clay figure into which life was rapidly pummeled and breathed, suddenly woke to the fact that for thirty years my life had been measured by clocks; that for people who are not Krepskis, Time is not a servant but an old and pitiless adversary. They have only so long on this earth and they want only to live, to have lived. And when the opportunity comes it is seized with predatory fury.

Deborah, how easy the choice might have been if I had not been a Krepski. Sometimes, in those early days, I would wake up, nestled by my wife’s ever-willing flesh and those years in Goswell Road would seem eclipsed: I was once more a boy — as on that audacious summer evening in Highgate — seduced by the world’s caress. But then, in an instant, I would remember my grandfather, waiting already at his work-bench, the Great Watch ticking in his pocket, the clock-making, time-enslaving blood that flowed in his and my veins.

How easy the choice if passion were boundless and endless. But it is not, that is the rub; it must be preserved before it perishes and put in some permanent form. All men must make their pact with history. The spring-tide of marriage ebbs, we are told, takes on slower, saner, more effectual rhythms; the white-heat cools, diffuses, but is not lost. All this is natural, and has its natural and rightful object. But it was here that Deborah and I came to the dividing of the ways. I watched my wife through the rusting iron railings of the playground of the primary school where sometimes I met her at lunch-time. There was a delicate, wholesome bloom on her cheeks. Who would have guessed where that bloom came from? Who could have imagined what wild abandon could seize this eminently respectable figure behind closed doors and drawn curtains?

Yet that abandon was no longer indulged; it was withheld, denied (I had come to relish it) and would only be offered freely again in exchange for a more lasting gift. And who could mistake what that gift must be, watching her in the playground, her teacher’s whistle round her neck, in the midst of those squealing infants, fully aware that my eyes were on her; patting on the head, as though to make the point unmistakable, now a pugnacious boy with grazed knees, now a Jamaican girl with pigtails?

Had I told her, in all this time, about the Great Watch? Had I told her that I might outlive her by perhaps a century and that our life together — all in all to her — might become (so, alas, it has) a mere oasis in the sands of memory? Had I told her that my grandfather, whom she thought a doughty man of seventy-five, was really twice that age? And had I told her that in us Krepskis the spirit of fatherhood is dead? We do not need children to carry our image into the future, to provide us with that overused bulwark against extinction.

No. I had told her none of these things. I held my tongue in the vain — the wishful? — belief that I might pass in her eyes for an ordinary mortal. If I told her, I assured myself, would she not think I was mad? And, then again, why should I not (was it so great a thing?) flout the scruples which were part of my heritage and give a child to this woman with whom, for a brief period at least, I had explored the timeless realm of passion?