Graham Swift: Learning to Swim: And Other Stories

Mrs. Singleton thought: He crawled out of me; now I have to lure him back with ice-cream.

“Can’t you see he was getting the hang of it?” Mr. Singleton said. “If he comes out now he’ll—”

“Hang of it! It was you. You were holding him all the time.”

She thought: Perhaps I am hurting my son.

Mr. Singleton glared at Mrs. Singleton. He gripped Paul’s shoulders. “You don’t want to get out now, do you Paul?” He looked suddenly as if he really might drown Paul rather than let him come out.

Mrs. Singleton’s heart raced. She wasn’t good at rescues, at resuscitations. She knew this because of her life with her husband.

“Come on, you can go back in later,” she said.

Paul was a hostage. She was playing for time, not wanting to harm the innocent.

She stood on the sand like a marooned woman watching for ships. The sea, in the sheltered bay, was almost flat calm. A few, glassy waves idled in but were smoothed out before they could break. On the headlands there were outcrops of scaly rocks like basking lizards. The island in Greece had been where Theseus left Ariadne. Out over the blue water, beyond the heads of bobbing swimmers, seagulls flapped like scraps of paper.

Mr. Singleton looked at Mrs. Singleton. She was a fussy mother daubed with Ambre Solaire, trying to bribe her son with silly ice-creams; though if you forgot this she was a beautiful, tanned girl, like the girls men imagine on desert islands. But then, in Mr. Singleton’s dreams, there was no one else on the untouched shore he ceaselessly swam to.

He thought, If Paul could swim, then I could leave her.

Mrs. Singleton looked at her husband. She felt afraid. The water’s edge was like a dividing line between them which marked off the territory in which each existed. Perhaps they could never cross over.

“Well, I’m getting the ice-creams: you’d better get out.”

She turned and paced up the sand. Behind the beach was an ice-cream van painted like a fairground.

Paul Singleton looked at his mother. He thought: She is deserting me — or I am deserting her. He wanted to get out to follow her. Her feet made puffs of sand which stuck to her ankles, and you could see all her body as she strode up the beach. But he was afraid of his father and his gripping hands. And he was afraid of his mother, too. How she would wrap him, if he came out, in the big yellow towel like egg yolk, how she would want him to get close to her smooth, sticky body, like a mouth that would swallow him. He thought: The yellow towel humiliated him, his father’s hands humiliated him. The water-wings humiliated him: You put them on and became a puppet. So much of life is humiliation. It was how you won love. His father was taking off the water-wings like a man unlocking a chastity belt. He said: “Now try the same, coming towards me.” His father stood some feet away from him. He was a huge, straight man, like the pier of a bridge. “Try.” Paul Singleton was six. He was terrified of water. Every time he entered it he had to fight down fear. His father never realized this. He thought it was simple; you said: “Only water, no need to be afraid.” His father did not know what fear was; the same as he did not know what fun was. Paul Singleton hated water. He hated it in his mouth and in his eyes. He hated the chlorine smell of the swimming baths, the wet, slippery tiles, the echoing whoops and screams. He hated it when his father read to him from The Water Babies. It was the only story his father read, because, since he didn’t know fear or fun, he was really sentimental. His mother read lots of stories. “Come on then. I’ll catch you.” Paul Singleton held out his arms and raised one leg. This was the worst moment. Perhaps having no help was most humiliating. If you did not swim you sank like a statue. They would drag him out, his skin streaming. His father would say: “I didn’t mean …” But if he swam his mother would be forsaken. She would stand on the beach with chocolate ice-cream running down her arm. There was no way out; there were all these things to be afraid of and no weapons. But then, perhaps he was not afraid of his mother nor his father, nor of water, but of something else. He had felt it just now — when he’d struck out with rhythmic, reaching strokes and his feet had come off the bottom and his father’s hand had slipped from under his chest: as if he had mistaken what his fear was; as if he had been unconsciously pretending, even to himself, so as to execute some plan. He lowered his chin into the water. “Come on!” said Mr. Singleton. He launched himself forward and felt the sand leave his feet and his legs wriggle like cut ropes. “There,” said his father as he realized. “There!” His father stood like a man waiting to clasp a lover; there was a gleam on his face. “Towards me! Towards me!” said his father suddenly. But he kicked and struck, half in panic, half in pride, away from his father, away from the shore, away, in this strange new element that seemed all his own.

UNCLE WALTER HAD HIS OWN theory of the value of zoos. He would say, eyeing us all from the head of the table: “Zoos ought to make us humble. When we visit them we ought to reflect — mere humans, mere evolutionary upstarts that we are — that we shall never have the speed of the cheetah, the strength of the bear, the grace of the gazelle, the agility of the gibbon. Zoos curb our pride; they show us our inadequacies …”

Having launched on this favourite theme, he would proceed inexorably to elaborate it, cataloguing joyously the virtues of animal after animal, so that I (a precocious boy, doing “A” levels), for whom zoos were, in one sense, places of rank vulgarity — tormenting elephants with ice-cream wrappers, grinning at monkeys copulating — could not resist punctuating his raptures with the one word: “Cages.”

Uncle Walter would not be daunted. He would continue his speech, come to rest again on the refrain, “Show us our inadequacies,” and, leaving us free once more to gobble his wife’s rock cakes and lemon-meringue pie, lean back in his chair as if his case were beyond dispute.

My uncle was not, so far as I knew, a religious man; but sometimes, after declaiming in this almost scriptural fashion, his face would take on the serene, linear looks of a Byzantine saint. It made one forget for a moment the real uncle: popeyed, pale skinned, with stains of tobacco, like the ink smudges of schoolboys, on his fingers and teeth, a mouth apt to twitch and to generate more spittle than it was capable of holding — and a less defined, overall awkwardness, as if the mould of his own features somehow constricted him. Every time we visited him for Sunday tea — in that cramped front room laden with books, photos, certificates and the odd stuffed insectivore, like a Victorian parlour in which “enthusiasts” would regularly meet — he would not fail to instil in us the moral advantages of zoos. When he came at last to a halt and began to light his pipe, his wife (my Aunt Mary), a small, mousy, but not unattractive woman, would get up embarrassedly and start to remove plates.

He lived in Finchley and was deputy keeper at one of the mammal houses at the Zoo. Martyr to his work, he would leave his home at all hours for a quite different world. After twenty-five years of marriage, he treated his wife like something he was still not quite certain how to handle.

We lived in the country not far from Norwich. It was perhaps because I regarded myself as closer to nature than Uncle Walter that I felt obliged to sneer at the artifice of zoos. Near our house were some woods, vestiges of a former royal hunting forest, in which you could sometimes glimpse wild fallow deer. One year, when I was still a boy, the deer vanished. About every six weeks we used to travel down to London to see my grandparents who lived in Highgate. And the weekend would always be rounded off by a visit to my uncle, who would meet us, usually, at the Zoo, then take us home to tea.