Graham Swift - Learning to Swim - And Other Stories

So I did not throw away the Watch: I found a shrine in which to place it. And I did not return — save to dispose of its meagre contents and arrange its sale — to the house in Highgate. I refashioned my world, on a hermit’s terms, out of an ancestral room in Whitechapel. Time, as even the ignorant will tell you and every clock-face will demonstrate, is circular. The longer you live, the more you long to go back, to go back. I closed my eyes on that old charlatan, the future. And Deborah remained for ever in her playground, whistling at her children, like someone vainly whistling for a runaway dog which already lies dead at the side of a road.

Thus I came to be sitting, a week ago, in that same room in Whitechapel, clutching, as I had that day by the Thames, the Watch in my itching palm. And still they came, the cries, desolate and unappeasable, from the floor below.

What was the meaning of these cries? I knew (I who had renounced such things to live in perpetual marriage with the Watch) they were the cries that come from the interminglings of men and women, the cries of heart-break and vain desire. I knew they were the cries of that same Asian woman who had opened the door for me that day of Grandfather’s cremation. A Mrs. — or Miss? — Matharu. The husband (lover?) had come and gone at varying times. A shift-worker of some sort. Sometimes I met him on the stairs. An exchange of nods; a word. But I did not seek more. I burrowed in my ancestral lair. And even when the shouting began — his ferocious, rapid, hers like some ruffled, clucking bird — I did not intervene. Thunder-storms pass. Clocks tick on. The shouts were followed by screams, blows, the noise of slamming doors — sobs. Still I sat tight. Then one day the door slammed with the unmistakable tone of finality (ah, Deborah); and the sobs that followed were not the sobs that still beg and plead, but solitary sobs, whimpering and dirge-like — the sobs of the lonely lingering out the empty hours.

Did I go down the stairs. Did I give a gentle knock to the door and ask softly, “Can I help?” No. The world is full of snares.

Time heals. Soon these whimperings would cease. And so they did. Or, rather, faded into almost-silence — only to build up again into new crescendos of anguish.

I gripped my ticking talisman, as the sick and dying cling, in their hour of need, to pitiful trinkets. Do not imagine that these female cries merely assailed my peace and did not bring to me, as to their utterer, real suffering. I recognised that they emanated from a region ungoverned by time — and thus were as poisonous, as lethal to us Krepskis as fresh air to a fish.

We were alone in the building, this wailing woman and I. The house — the whole street — lay under the ultimatum of a compulsory purchase. The notices had been issued. Already the other rooms were vacated. And already, beyond my windows, walls were tumbling, bulldozers were sending clouds of dust into the air. The house of Krepski must fall soon; as had fallen already the one-time houses of Jewish tailors, Dutch goldsmiths, Russian furriers — a whole neighborhood of immigrant tradesmen, stepping off the ships at London docks and bringing with them the strands of their far-flung pasts. How could it be that all this history had been reduced, before my eyes, to a few heaps of flattened rubble and a few grey demarcations of corrugated fencing?

Another rending cry, like the tearing of flesh itself. I stood up: I clutched my forehead; sat down; stood up again. I descended the stairs. But I did not loosen my grip on the Watch.

She lay — beneath a tangled heap of bedclothes, on a mattress in the large, draughty room which I imagined had once been my great-grandfather’s drawing-room, but which now served as living-room, kitchen and bedroom combined — in the obvious grip not so much of grief as of illness. Clearly, she had been unable to answer my knock at the door, which was unlocked, and perhaps had been for weeks. Sweat beaded her face. Her eyes burned. And even as I stood over her she drew a constricted gasp of pain and her body shuddered beneath the heaped bedclothes which I suspected had been pulled rapidly about her as I entered.

Circumstances conspire. This woman, as I knew from the dozen words we had exchanged in little more than a year, spoke scarcely any English. She could not describe her plight; I could not inquire. No language was needed to tell me I should fetch a doctor, but as I bent over her, with the caution with which any Krepski bends over a woman, she suddenly gripped my arm, no less fiercely than my free hand gripped the Watch. When I signalled my intention, mouthing the word “doctor” several times, she gripped it tightly still, and an extra dimension of torment seemed to enter her face. It struck me that had I been a younger man (I was sixty-three, but little did she know that in Krepski terms I was still callow) her grip on my arm might have been less ready. Even so, fear as much as importunacy knotted her face. More than one layer of shame seemed present in her eyes as she let out another uncontrollable moan and her body strained beneath the bedclothes.

“What’s wrong? What’s wrong?”

You will doubtless think me foolish and colossally ignorant for not recognising before this point the symptoms of child-birth. For such they were. I, a Krepski who held in my hand the power to live so long and whose forefathers had lived so long before him, did not recognise the beginnings of life, and did not know what a woman in labour is like. But, once the knowledge dawned, I understood not only the fact but its implications and the reasons for this woman’s mingled terror and entreaty. The child was the child of a fugitive father. Daddy was far away, ignorant perhaps of this fruit of his dalliance, just as my father Stefan, far away on the North Sea, was ignorant of my mother stooping over my cot. Daddy, perhaps, was no Daddy by law; and who could say whether by law either Daddy or Mummy were rightful immigrants? That might explain the hand gripping me so tightly as I turned for professional help. Add to all this that I was an Englishman and I bent over this woman — whose mother had perhaps worn a veil in some village by the Ganges — as she suffered the most intimate female distress … You will see the position was vexed.

And I had no choice but to be the witness — the midwife — to this hopeless issue.

I understood that the moment was near. Her black-olive eyes fixed me from above the tangled sheets, in which, as if obeying some ancient instinct, she tried to hide her mouth. The point must soon come when she must abandon all modesty — and I all squeamishness — and I could see her weighing this terrible candour against the fact that I was her only help.

But as we stared at each other a strange thing happened. In the little half-oval of face which she showed me I seemed to see, as if her eyes were equipped with some extraordinary ultra-optical lens, the huge hinterlands of her native Asia and the endless nut-brown faces of her ancestors. At the same time, marshalled within myself, assembling from the distant margins of Poland, were the ranks of my Krepski sires. What a strange thing that our lives should collide, here where neither had its origins. How strange that they should collide at all. What a strange and extraordinary thing that I should be born a Krepski, she a Matharu. What an impossible concatenation of chances goes to the making of any birth.

I must have smiled at these thoughts — or at least lent to my face some expression which infected hers. For her look suddenly softened — her black irises melted — then immediately hardened again. She screwed her eyes shut, let out a scream, and with a gesture of submission — as she might have submitted to that brute of a husband — pulled back the bedclothes from the lower part of her body, drew up her legs, and, clutching at the bed-head, with her hands, began to strain mightily.