Graham Swift - Learning to Swim - And Other Stories

Our marriage entered its fourth year. She approached the ominous age of forty. I was forty-seven, a point at which other men might recognise the signs of age but at which I felt only the protective armour of the Watch tighten around me, the immunity of Krepskihood squeeze me like an iron maiden. Dear Father Stefan, I prayed in hope. But no answering voice came from the cold depths of the Skaggerak or the Heligoland Bight. Instead I imagined a ghostly sigh from far off Poland — and an angry murmuring, perhaps, closer to hand, as Great-grandfather Stanislaw turned in his Highgate grave.

And I looked each day into the tacitly retributive eyes of my grandfather.

Deborah and I waged war. We bickered, we quarrelled, we made threats. And then at last, abandoning all subterfuge, I told her.

She did not think I was mad. Something in my voice, my manner told her that this was not madness. If it had been madness, perhaps, it would have been easier to endure. Her face turned white. In one fell stroke her universe was upturned. Her stock of love, her hungry flesh, her empty womb were mocked and belittled. She looked at me as if I might have been a monster with two heads or a fish’s tail. The next day she fled—“left me” is too mild a term — and, rather than co-exist another hour with my indefinite lease on life, returned to her mother, who — poor soul — was ailing, in need of nursing, and shortly to die.

Tick-tock, tick-tock. The invalid clocks clanked and wheezed on the shelves in Goswell Road. Grandfather showed tact. He did not rub salt in the wound. Our reunion even had, too, its brief honeymoon. The night of Deborah’s departure I sat up with him in the house at Highgate and he recalled, not with the usual dry deliberateness but with tender spontaneity, the lost Poland of his youth. Yet this very tenderness was an ill omen. Men of fantastic age are not given to nostalgia. It is the brevity of life, the rapid passage of finite years, that gives rise to sentiment and regret. During my interlude with Deborah a change had crept over my grandfather. The air of stagnancy, the fixation in the eyes were still there but what was new was that he himself seemed aware of these things as he had not before. Sorrow shadowed his face, and weariness, weariness.

The shop was on its last legs. Anyone could see there was no future in it; and yet for Grandfather, for me, there was, always, future. We pottered away, in the musty workroom, eking out what scant business came our way. The Great Watch, that symbol of Time conquered ticking remorselessly in Grandfather’s waistcoat, had become, we knew, our master. Sometimes I dreamt wildly of destroying it, of taking a hammer to its invulnerable mechanism. But how could I have committed an act so sacrilegious, and one which, for all I knew, might have reduced my grandfather, in an instant to dust?

We worked on. I remember the hollow mood — neither relief nor reluctance but some empty reflex between the two — with which we shut the shop each night at six and made our journey home. How we would sit, like two creatures sealed in a bubble, as our number 43 trundled up the Holloway Road, watching the fretfulness of the evening rush (how frenzied the activity of others when one’s own pace is slow and interminable) with a cold rep-tilean stare.

Ah, happy restless world, with oblivion waiting to solve its cares.

Ah, lost Deborah, placing gladioli on the grave of her mother.

The sons, and grandsons, of the ordinary world do their duty by their sires. They look after them in their twilight years. But what if twilight never falls?

By the summer of my grandfather’s hundred and sixty-second year I could endure no more. With the last dregs of my feeble savings I rented a cottage in the Sussex downs. My aim was to do what necessity urged: to sell up the shop; to find myself a job with a steady income by which I might support Grandfather and myself. Admittedly, I was now fifty-five, but my knowledge of clocks might find me a place with an antique dealer’s or as sub-curator in some obscure museum of horology. In order to attempt all this, Grandfather had first to be lured to a safe distance.

This is not to say that the cottage was merely an — expensive — expedient. One part of me sincerely wished my grandfather to stop peering into the dusty orbs of clocks and to peer out again at the World — even the tame, parochial world of Sussex. Ever lurking in my mind was the notion that age ripens, mellows and brings it own, placid contentments. Why had not his unique length of years afforded my grandfather more opportunity to enjoy, to savour, to contemplate the world? Why should he not enter now an era of meditative tranquillity, of god-like congruence with Nature? Youth should bow to age not only in duty but in veneration. Perhaps I had always been ashamed — perhaps it was a source of secret despair for my own future — that my grandfather’s years had only produced in him the crabbed, cantankerous creature I knew. Perhaps I hoped that extraordinary age might have instilled in him extraordinary sagacity. Perhaps I saw him — wild, impossible vision — turning in his country hermitage into some hallowed figure, a Sussex shaman, a Wise Man of the Downs, an oracle to whom the young and foolish world might flock for succour.

Or perhaps my motive was simpler than this. Perhaps it was no more than that of those plausible, burdened sons and daughters who, with well-meaning looks and at no small cost, place their parents in Homes, in order to have them out of sight and mind — in order, that is, to have them safely murdered.

My clinching argument was that, though all that would be left of Krepski and Krepski would be the Great Watch, yet that all would be all-in-all. And as a preliminary concession I agreed to spend a first experimental weekend with him at the cottage.

We travelled down on a Friday afternoon. It was one of those close, sullen high-summer days which make the flesh crawl and seem to bring out from nowhere swarms of flying insects. Grandfather sat in his seat in the railway carriage and hid his face behind a newspaper. This, like the weather, was a bad sign. Normally, he regarded papers with disdain. What did the news of 1977 mean to a man born in 1808? Almost by definition, papers were tokens of man’s subjection to time; their business was ephemerality. Yet recently, so I had noticed, he had begun to buy them and to read them almost with avidity; and what his eyes went to first were reports of accidents and disasters, sudden violent deaths …

Now and then, as we passed through the Surrey suburbs, he came out from behind his screen. His face was not the face of a man travelling towards rejuvenating horizons. It was the petrified face of a man whom no novelty can touch.

The Sussex downs, an hour from London, still retain their quiet nooks and folds. Our cottage — one of a pair let by some palm-rubbing local speculator as weekend retreats — stood at one end of the village and at the foot of one of these characteristic, peculiarly female eminences of the Downs, referred to in the Ordnance Survey map as a beacon. In spite of the sticky heat, I proposed this as the object of a walk the day after our arrival. The place was a noted viewpoint. Let us look down, I thought, us immortals, at the world.

Grandfather was less enthusiastic. His reluctance had nothing to do with his strength of limb. The climb was steep, but Grandfather despite his years, was as fit as a man of forty. His unwillingness lay in a scarcely concealed desire to sabotage and deride this enterprise of mine. He had spent the first hours after our arrival shambling around the cottage, not bothering to unpack his things, inspecting the oak timbers, the “traditional fireplace” and the “charming cottage garden” with an air of acid distaste, and finally settling heavily into a chair in just the same hunched manner in which he settled into his habitual chair in Highgate or his work stool at the shop. Long life ought to elicit a capacity for change. But it is the opposite (I know it well). Longevity encourages intransigence, conservatism. It teaches you to revert to type.