Learning to Swim: And Other Stories

Cliffedge

WHAT IS IT ABOUT THE sea that summons people to it? That beckons the idle to play and ponder at its skirts? What was it that built these ice-cream coloured colonies, these outposts of pleasure along the clifftops and shingle of the south coast? Pleasure of being on the brink? Pleasure in the precariousness of pleasure? How would they have become so strangely intense, so strangely all-in-all, these little worlds (the pier, the life-boat station, the aquarium) we once knew for two weeks out of every fifty-two, were it not for their being pressed against this sleeping monster, the sea?

We came here long ago, Neil and I. To — let me call it, for reasons of my own — Cliffedge. We arrived every August on the train with our parents. It had then the peculiar set-apart redolence of “holidays.” Foreign, enchanting, but not real. It might — it ought to — have remained no more than a memory, lingering yet fading, like the fading photographs taken at the time: the two of us buried up to our necks in sand; or splashing in the waves. Neil, two years my younger, the slighter, more angular, more excitable figure.

I could not have imagined that in fifteen, in twenty years’ time that world of salt and sunburn would not yet have passed into remembrance. That I would still be going with my brother, he thirty-three, I thirty-five, to the same resort; that I would buy him on the train, not lemonade and chocolate as Mother and Father did, but beer and cigarettes; that I would watch him — as if indeed I had taken over the former roles of my parents — on the clifftops, on the pebbles, playing his dangerous games.

I said to Mary: I have this brother who has never grown up. I have to take him every so often on outings and pleasure trips, even on holidays to the seaside. This is serious and necessary. What makes it serious is that unlike children when their pleasures are denied them, Neil does not merely throw tantrums. He threatens to kill himself. I was wary, apologetic. Mary frowned, looked momentarily grave, even a little aggrieved; then, putting her hand on mine, she gave her bright, slightly hard expression — an expression I have come to know so well, along with its secret meaning: I can look out for myself; there is no question of my ability. She squeezed my hand and smiled. Then she said, “I’m sure we can cope.” And that word, also, I have come to know well — to regard it almost as Mary’s motto and philosophy in a single sound: “Cope.”

That was years ago too, before we married. And Mary could not perhaps have known how deadly earnest I had been in my warnings. How what at first had seemed a trying if manageable obstacle, to be surmounted in time, became an irremovable burden. How her “coping” (for she never failed to cope) was to progress first to a kind of righteous detachment — It is your problem, I do not deserve to be impeded by it — then to the pitch where, when I would take Neil on his “holidays,” she too would take holidays of her own (it was unthinkable that the three of us could have gone away together); holidays which I was not slow to understand were spent in the company of her lover.

I remember one summer long ago at Cliffedge Neil wanted to take a trip on one of the boats the fishermen used for taking parties mackerel fishing. The weather was unfavourable — the sky overcast, the sea heaving sluggishly — but it was the last day of our holiday and my father (who, so I know now, had his own cause for reluctance) yielded. We set off. Beyond the shelter of the bay the swell became suddenly heavy, a squally wind slapped us. I became seasick. My father was grimly silent. Neil did not have the least qualm. He caught six mackerel that day, hauling them in on the end of the line the fisherman prepared. He leant well out of the boat, eyes on the taut nylon as it cut the water. As the boat began to pitch and roll his face became flushed with ferocious glee. I had this sudden feeling that I must look after Neil, that I must protect him. But at the same time nausea assailed me. I spent the rest of that fishing trip fighting my stomach — fighting too what I can only describe as fear of the waves—and when I finally spewed up, weak-legged, over the harbour wall, it was Neil who looked at me — his six bloody-gilled mackerel looped on a string — as if I needed protection.

It required no expert in psychology to see that Neil had never broken free from childhood. At twenty he was still living in the same world he had inhabited at eight, still pursuing, in some obstinate inner space, the same infant quests he had pursued at Cliffedge. It was when he was sixteen (the year after Mother and Father died and his last at school — the teachers noticed the distressing signs) that he made his first attempts on his life. That year, too, began his innumerable spells as a hospital inmate — and my dutiful, wearisome visits. The doctors achieved little. Whenever he was discharged they would advise, in their half-hearted way, a period of rest, a change of air. I would say, But he only wants to be taken to Cliffedge. Wouldn’t that exacerbate, entrench the problem? Yes, they would say, with a shrug, but sometimes there were risks too on the other side — in not letting the patient have his way.

And so we came to Cliffedge. Year after year. And I would be half this genial and obliging uncle (Take me on the toy railway. Please. Take me on the crazy golf) and half this solemn warden (A boat trip? No, no boat trips. A walk on the cliff? Only if you promise—promise—to keep to the path). I dared not let him out of my sight. At night, in our hotel room, after I had put him, drugged, to bed, like a tired child, I used to long to slip out to one of the bars by the seafront and talk to some ordinary man — a salesman or gas fitter on holiday with his family. I would think: If Neil were not the way he was, if he were just my brother, we would stand each other drinks, talk about our jobs, our wives. I would lie awake, listening to him muttering in his strange, busy dreams, and say to myself: My God, what he owes to me, how much he owes to me. The hotel plumbing would gurgle and it would seem to me that I was chained and anchored to this hotel bedroom, to this seaside resort which I had known as a boy. As if my life were really only a small, contracted thing which had never passed certain limits. And then I would think of Mary.

When I was seventeen my father confided in me his fear of water. He was a strong, dependable man, not given to talking about himself. I took this disclosure as a sign of trust and initiation, as a sign of my own coming of age; and yet I remember I also despised him for his admission and I experienced a pang of disappointment — as I recall it now, I experience it again — that this solid, self-contained man whom I emulated was the victim of such an irrational weakness. He could not swim and he had always been uneasy (he alluded to that boat trip of several years before) at any journey on water. It was absurd, but he would rather travel for miles over land than make a simple sea crossing. All of which was cruelly ironic; for less than six months later — I was suddenly the head of a family of two — he and Mother were to die in a motor accident.

There are couples who marry out of feeling and there are couples who marry precisely in order to conceal their feelings. Mary and I have always been of this second category. It is as though we reached an understanding at the beginning that what affected us inwardly was our own and strictly private affair, an encumbrance not to be imposed on the other, and that our relationship was to be one of practical workability. Mary had a lightness, a lack of anything intense, which used to tantalise me. But what impressed me most about her in those early days was her aura of competence and decision, her air of offering me a partnership in an efficient, grown-up progress through the world. Whenever we discussed Neil, it was to speak of him as a nuisance, an inconvenience, who was nonetheless not to be allowed to upset the smooth business-like machinery of our marriage. And I was glad of this brisk attitude which seemed to clear so much space.

And yet Neil became, over the years, less the nuisance, more a necessity. He gave Mary cause for a constant entitlement to compensation, and placed on me the constant onus of redress. My relations with my brother were to be kept apart but, in so far as they impinged on Mary, she was to be allowed in return her own separate concessions. It was during perhaps the fifth year of our marriage that I first understood she had a lover. This was not a circumstance, either, to interfere with our marital efficiency. We remained the capable, well-matched couple whom our friends, I genuinely believe, respected and admired. Our task became to demonstrate that such we were. And yet it seems to me now that this profession of strength depended all along on Neil. Neil was the unmentioned foil to our competence, the gauge of our stability. Was it possible that Mary had married me, in some obscure, paradoxical way, because of Neil?

I did my best to find out about her lover. By the tacit rules we had imposed on ourselves this was forbidden — but I discovered nothing, not even his name. Mary was scrupulous in the conduct of her affair and, short of hiring a private detective, I could ascertain little. She was fully aware that I had my suspicions, but her attitude to this might have been expressed, had it ever been uttered, in the word, “Very well, you know what I am doing. But then — you are perfectly free to do the same.” To which she might have added the rider: “Though you would not be able to exercise the same control, would you?” And, indeed, one of the notable things about Mary’s “holidays” is the way they were kept within strict and defined limits. Returning from them, she would slip calmly back into the routines of our marriage without any spilling over from the one compartment into the other. She has this talent for organising and administering to her needs, as if she were measuring out slightly bad-tasting but beneficial medicines. Thus it seems to me that she always rationed meticulously the sexual element in our marriage, as if aware of some danger amidst the pleasure.

One evening when I visited Neil in his hospital something suddenly became clear to me. Over the years, I had come to regard Neil less and less as my brother. When I visited him or took him on those trips to Cliffedge he became, increasingly, simply a charge, a liability. I was doing my duty, like a father towards a bastard child. In a strange way Neil had ceased even to resemble me physically. His appearance — it is hard to know how to put this — had taken on, after all those spells of “treatment,” a roughness, a wildness, as if he had just returned from an arduous trip to some forsaken part of the earth. He was scarcely civilised; and yet beneath it all, if you looked, was the delicacy and simplicity of a child. Sometimes when I arrived at the hospital he would blink warningly at me, as if I were trespassing, presuming. What overcame me that evening was not just the thought, which now and then would pierce me, that this alien creature was my brother, but the fact that I envied him.

When I returned that night to Mary she was sitting, smoking a cigarette, with the air she adopts on such and other occasions of a woman kept waiting for an appointment. I knew at once, by the look both of alertness and of slight distaste in her face that she detected a change of mood in me. I did not sit down. I wanted to see her moved, just for once, by anger, fear. She drew on her cigarette and, as was her usual practice, declined to ask about Neil. Her cool, cosmetic poise suddenly repelled me. It struck me that possibly I had been wrong about the even, mutual arrangement of our marriage. That all along Mary had regarded me, in some measure, as I regarded Neil; that she was observing me, testing me by her, not our, rules of maturity. Perhaps she was waiting for me, even then — half daring me — to defy the rules, to relax my guard. And what would happen if I did? Perhaps she would go to live permanently with her lover.

“Why don’t you ask about Neil?!” I screamed in her face. “Ask about Neil, you bitch!”

There was no need for either of us to seek reasons for this crude — and ineffective — outburst. I picked up an ash-tray. A glass ashtray. I wanted to throw it at her. But she said quietly: “Don’t be foolish. Don’t be a child.”

The white cliffs rear up on either inside of Cliffedge like watchful giants. Neil always loved to walk on the cliffs. Even on those early holidays he was always wandering from the safe sand to those extremities of the beach where the chalk towered and boulders strewed the water’s edge. Once he said, pointing to a less precipitous section where a sort of gully had been worn out, “There’s a path, let’s climb up.” But I have never seen the point of purposeless risks, of courting disaster. No, I said, as if to warn him.

And that last time, that last walk on the cliffs (past the coast-guard station, the plinth commemorating some nineteenth century wreck) I was as vigilant as ever, as dutiful as ever. No, Neil — away from the edge. But perhaps for one moment I relaxed my guard, perhaps I was thinking of other things: of Mary between the sheets with her medicinal lover; or perhaps I was looking down at the distant ribbon of the town, at the scraps of colour still littering the evening beach, at the sunlight catching the pier pavilion and the seafront hotels, and was thinking: It will only add spice to their holiday gaiety, it will only send a thrill through the sprawling crowds on the beach to learn of it. “Death Plunge,” Brothers in Seaside Tragedy.” Perhaps I shouldn’t have said to him, “Don’t you know how much you owe to me? Don’t you?”

Mary left a month ago. I have brought too many forbidden things into her life and so broken our contract. But I know now that she has not left me out of contempt, out of cold-blooded rejection, but out of fear. She was frightened. Those first days after Neil’s death I cried like a baby. I had never cried in front of Mary before. And through my tears I saw in her face something more than intolerance or disgust — I saw horror.

But the inquest cleared me of suspicion. They declared an open verdict. They recognised that Neil was not an ordinary case, and that I had been like a father to him. I am free now. Free of a wife, and free, some would say, of a burdensome brother. But if I wished to be free of him, if I wished to be done with those repeated obligations, those repeated scenes he imposed on my life, why should I have returned, these last three weekends, to Cliffedge? To the same hotel, the same seafront, the same miniature but — as I know it now — far from simple world that has shadowed me from childhood?

I have been looking for Neil. That is why. I do not believe he is dead. He cannot have deserted me. Some day, by one of the familiar spots — the band-stand, the Harbour Café, the putting green — I will find him. He will be just one of the many “lost children” of the beach.

At night I do not seek ordinary company in pubs. I lie awake in the hotel room hoping to hear Neil murmur in his sleep. I feel so afraid. The gurgling of the pipes turns into the roar of great oceans. When I sleep I have this dream. I am alone in the boat. I am leaning over the side looking at my line disappearing into the water. I know that Neil is somewhere there in the depths and I will catch him. I start to pull in. A storm is brewing and the waves are rising up against the boat. I pull and pull so as to catch him in time. But the line is endless.