Graham Swift: Learning to Swim: And Other Stories

“And therefore,” I continued, “if a thing which was known to exist ceases to exist, then doesn’t it occupy the same status as something which exists but is not known to exist?”

My uncle furrowed his pasty brows and pushed forward his lower lip. Two nights a week, to make a little extra money, I was taking an evening class in Philosophy (for which I had no formal qualification) at an Adult Institute, and I enjoyed this teasing with realities. I would have led my uncle to a position where one might still assume the existence of an undiscoverable Dodo.

“Facts,” he replied, knocking his pipe, “scientific data — sound investigatory work — like Hoffmeier’s for example”—in a jerky shorthand which betrayed unease. I knew he was not a scientist at heart. Well read enough, privately, to pass for a professional zoologist, he would never have done so, for he liked, as he put it, to work “with” not “on” animals. But science, nonetheless, was the power he called, reluctantly, guiltily, to his aid whenever his ground was threatened.

“Science — only concerned with the known,” he flung out with a pinched, self-constraining look; though a glint deep in his eye told me that he had already fully pursued and weighed my arguments, was open, despite himself, to their seduction.

“Whatever is found to exist or ceases to exist,” I went on, “nothing is altered, since the sum of what exists is always the sum of what exists.”

“Quite!” said my uncle as if this were a refutation. He settled back in his chair and raised to his lips the glass of frothy stout that stood on the arm-rest (Guinness was my uncle’s one indulgence).

I wished to manoeuvre him towards the vexed question of why it was that — if we were prepared to admit the possibility of species that might never be discovered, that might live, die and vanish altogether, unrecorded, in remote forests and tundra — we should yet feel the obligation to preserve from oblivion, merely because they were known, creatures whose survival was threatened — to the extent, even, of removing them from their natural habitat, transporting them in planes, enclosing them, like the Hoffmeier’s Antelopes, in antiseptic pens.

But I stalled at this. It seemed too sharp an assault upon a tender spot. Besides, I really felt the opposite of my own question. The notion that creatures of which we had no knowledge might inhabit the world was thrilling to me, not meaningless, like the existence, in maths, of “imaginary” numbers. Uncle Walter eyed me, moving his pipe from side to side between his teeth. I thought of the word “ruminant” which in zoology means “cud-chewer.” I said, instead of what I had intended: “The point is not what exists or doesn’t, but that, even given the variety of known species, we like to dream up others. Think of the animals in myth — griffins, dragons, unicorns …”

“Ha!” said my uncle, with a sudden piercing of my inmost thoughts which jolted me, “You are jealous of my antelope.”

But I answered, with a perception which equally surprised me: “And you are jealous of Hoffmeier.”

The plight of the two antelopes at this time was giving cause for anxiety. The pair had not mated when first brought together, and now, in a second breeding season, showed little further sign of doing so. Since the male was a comparatively weak specimen there was fear that the last chances of saving the animal from extinction, at least for another generation, were empty ones. Uncle Walter’s role during this period, like that of other zoo officials, was to coax the two animals into union. I wondered how this was contrived. The antelopes when I saw them looked like two lonely, companionless souls, impossibly lost to each other even though they shared a species in common.

Yet my uncle was clearly wrapped in the task of producing an offspring from the creatures. Throughout those weeks after my aunt’s death his face wore a fixed, haunted, vigilant look, and it would have been hard to say whether this was grief for his wife or concern for his issueless antelopes. It struck me for the first time — this was something I had never really considered, despite all those Sunday teas as a boy — that he and my aunt were childless. The thought of my uncle — lanky and slobbery, fingers and teeth stained indelibly amber, exhaling fumes of stout and raw onion — as a begetter of progeny was not an easy one. And yet this man, who could reel off for you, if you asked, the names of every known species of Cervinae , of Hippotraginae , teemed, in another sense, with life. When he returned home late on those March evenings, a dejected expression on his face, and I would ask him, with scarcely a trace, now, of sarcasm in my voice, “No?” and he would reply, removing his wet coat, shaking his bowed head, “No,” I began to suspect — I do not know why — that he had really loved my aunt. Though he hardly knew how to show affection, though he had forsaken her, like a husband who goes fishing at weekends, for his animals, yet there was somewhere, unknown to me, in that house in Finchley a whole world of posthumous love for his wife.

My own love-life, in any case, occupied me enough at this time. Alone in an unfamiliar city, I acquired one or two shortlived and desultory girlfriends whom I sometimes took back to Uncle Walter’s. Not knowing what his reaction might be, fearing that some spirit of scholarly celibacy lurked in the zoological tomes and in the collection of taxidermies, I took care to ensure these visits took place while he was out, and to remove all traces, from my front bedroom, of what they entailed. But he knew, I soon sensed, what I was up to. Perhaps he could sniff such things out, like the animals he tended. And my exploits prompted him, moreover, to a rare and candid admission. For one night, after several bottles of stout, my uncle — who would not have flinched from examining closely the sexual parts of a gnu or okapi — confessed with quivering lips that in thirty years of marriage he could never approach “without qualms” what he called his wife’s “secret regions.”

But this was later, after things had worsened.

“Jealous of Hoffimeier?” said my uncle. “Why should I be jealous of Hoffmeier?” His lips twitched. Behind his head was an anti-macassar, with crochet borders, made by my aunt.

“Because he discovered a new species.”

Even as I spoke I considered that the discovery might be only half the enviable factor. Hoffmeier had also won for himself a kind of immortality. The man might perish, but — so long at least as a certain animal survived — his name would, truly, live.

“But — Hoffmeier — zoologist. Me? Just a dung-scraper.” Uncle Walter reverted to his self-effacing staccato.

“Tell me about Hoffmeier.”

Hoffmeier’s name, Hoffmeier’s deeds sounded endlessly on my uncle’s lip, but of the man himself one scarcely knew anything.

“Hoffmeier? Oh, expert in his field. Undisputed …”

“No — what was he like?” (I said “was” though I had no certain knowledge that Hoffmeier was dead.)

“Like—?” My uncle, who was preparing himself, pipe raised to stress the items, for the catalogue of Hoffmeier’s credentials, looked up, his wet lips momentarily open. Then, clamping the pipe abruptly between his teeth and clutching the bowl with his hand, he stiffened into almost a parody of “the comrade recalled.”

“The man you mean? Splendid fellow. Boundless energy, tremendous dedication. Couldn’t have met a kinder … Great friend to me …”

I began to doubt the reality of Hoffmeier. His actual life seemed as tenuous and elusive as that of the antelope he had rescued from anonymity. I could not picture this stalwart scientist. He had the name of a Jewish impresario. I imagined my uncle going to him and being offered the antelope like some unique form of variety act.