Creative Writing Assignment 2

This was the second assignment for my creative writing course at Birbeck University. The assignement was for one person to interview another, and for one more person to listen, and take notes of the quotes of what they said. I had to choose one of my quotes, which is the first sentence of this piece, and then use it as the basis for a piece of writing. I read this in class, and got the impression that it was too long. Let me know what you think. After the class, I went home and re-wrote it in third person, which shortened it quite a lot, even though I added a bit more in terms of narrative. That is the one that I posted as Assignment 2, variation. I would really be interested in which you think works better.
 
    "I do like tennis, but I swim."

Diether, a man with whom I had recently become friends, said this. We were speaking over a coffee in the Porchester Sports Club, where we are both members.

    I had watched him swim, his monotonous breathing done up and down the pool as his strokes glanced in and out of the water, barely causing a ripple, a fluid movement, beautiful to watch. He did this every day for 2000 metres, or about 40 minutes.

    The first time we met, I had just finished swimming 1000 metres, which was a lot for me at the time, and swum with considerably less grace than Diether. I was in the dressing room, he came in from the pool, still in his Speedo and swim cap, we began changing together near the same lockers, and began talking, as you do, about the recent freezing weather and not wanting to go out in it.

    "Why don't we have a cup of coffee at the bar?" I suggested after we had both changed, and that is exactly what we did.

    "You're such a beautiful swimmer," I said. It is a bit odd for men, in conversation with one another, to refer to traits of other men as 'beautiful,' but I am one of those people who like rather expressive language. I also like women, if that was your next question.

    "Thank you. Swimming is an important thing to me. It keeps me fit and sane," he answered.

    It was maybe a few months later, when, again over coffee in the bar, we somehow began talking of tennis. Perhaps it was coming on spring time, and I was beginning to yearn for the courts. That is when he made the comment about liking tennis, but swimming.

    The comment tickled something in me, and began my fascination with him. It could be that it was because he was German, or that he was rather set in his ways, but I found it at once hilarious and worthy of derision. I have learned my lesson at my age, though, and kept my mirth to myself.

    "But do you like to swim?" I asked.

    "That is not the point—I do it for myself. My body likes it."

    "What about your soul, though? Don't you become bored?"

    "You don't understand," he said, and was absolutely right.

    I was to see him many more times, and despite the fact that I teased him about how stiff he was, albeit obliquely, and unlikely to pierce his Teutonic armour, we became friends.

    Friendship, in this case, meant swimming together maybe once a week, though I was really no match for his form, I could at least almost keep up. It meant dinners every week or two, and drinks on Friday evenings. And it meant a sincere regard for one another, though it must be said that the regard I had for him was tinged with a certain fascination at what I saw as his eccentricity. In hindsight, it was less that he was eccentric than the fact that we were quite different in outlook. Normally one has a hard time warming to someone as different, but in this case, for whatever reasons, I found myself enthusiastically looking forward to our meetings.

    Diether was not a man one got to know very well, very quickly, and it took me a long time to piece together who was, what he did, and from where he had come. He was German. I already mentioned that. He had been married to an English woman, but they had divorced a number of years before. They had a daughter, Hannah, who had lived with her mother, but who Diether saw often. She was a nice girl, and Diether was justly pleased with how she had turned out, despite some misgivings about her mother's child-rearing skills and the fact that she had grown up in a country that Diether did not particularly like.

    Diether had moved to England initially to join his wife on a two year assignment. She had been working for a large German bank in Germany when they had met, before the City had become so dominant in finance, and that is where they had met. Cologne, it had been, when that city was rather influential, being just up the road from Bonn, prior to the fall of the wall. Having lived in Cologne myself for a short time, I was sympathetic to why Diether's ex-wife had taken the assignment in London. Though a very nice city, Cologne is very closed in terms of allowing outsiders in. I mentioned this opinion once to Diether, himself Koelsh (being from Cologne), and his response was that "it was better than London, where everyone is welcome, even the English." He had that 'bah-humbug' air of him. In some of my classmates in university I had heard such statements, uttered in an attempt to goad someone into protesting or calling the utterer a racist bastard, or said with sly irony to suggest the opposite.

    In Diether, though, there was no irony. None. That was likely another aspect of England that he disliked: To someone unable to use or understand irony, living in England, it must be almost as though you don't understand the language. I don't know, but can guess, that after he and his wife began to live in England, and speak English, that could have been one of the things that made their relationship difficult. I imagine his wife must have found his irony deficiency tiring.

    Diether was a master printer. The Germans, he told me, make the best presses in the world, and I will have to trust him on that point, knowing nothing of the subject myself. Being a master printer involved an apprenticeship which began when he was 14 years old, and continued until after he was 20. There were tests along the way. But after he had finished his apprenticeship he was merely a journeyman printer, meaning that the formal training of the apprenticeship gave way to more responsibility, and more focus on the job itself. After nearly 10 years of that, he had become a master printer, meaning that he could run a wide variety of printing presses, and could manage others to do it, too. He had had his own apprentices, though not for long, since about two years after becoming a master printer in Cologne, he had followed his wife to the UK.

    In London, aided by his former company, and contacts they had in the UK, he landed a job as the foreman of the print shop of one of London's major daily newspapers. This meant odd work hours, which could have been one more reason his wife had wanted out. He worked from 9 pm to 6 am, so I am not sure how much of a sex life they must have had. In fact, he still works those hours. They suit him, he said, and there is no reason to change that which suits. That was Diether all over. He still complained about the fact that his company moved their printing facility outside of London, down near Gatwick, and he refused to move out of his central London flat to be closer to work. I guess with the hours he worked, traffic wasn't really a problem.

    One day I was at Diether's flat in Bayswater, on Inverness Terrace. He had a nice, large apartment there on the first floor of a Georgian townhouse, in fact taking the whole floor. He liked, he said, to have somewhere for his daughter to stay, though by that time she was off at Oxford and I don't believe that she often stayed. In any case, his apartment was large by London standards. He had a large kitchen/lounge/dining area with lovely high frescoed ceilings, wooden floors, two bedrooms, and French windows looking out on to Inverness Terrace.

    Diether loved to cook. Like everything that he set his mind to, he was very methodical and precise, following the recipes very carefully, and reading books to develop his cooking skills. On this evening, he was preparing a Spanish meal of some sort, with fish, a very good gazpacho, and something else I can't remember, for reasons which I will explain in a minute. Diether spent two weeks every summer (and if he said every, you could count on there being no lapses) in Majorca, and that had been one of the things that had caused him to want to cook in the first place, to recreate some of the foods that he had there. So a Spanish meal with Diether was in no way unusual.

    What was unusual happened as he was preparing dinner. We heard some voices outside the door to his flat, coming from the landing. That wasn't so strange, I guess, as there was another family living on the second floor, and they of course had to get there somehow. These voices, though, were speaking a language that I didn't understand, rather loudly, and it wasn't the French of Diether's upstairs neighbours. And they continued to speak loudly for maybe ten minutes.

    "Your doorman has let some riffraff in the building, old boy," I said with a posh voice and a grin.

    "Unfortunately, James, I do not have a doorman. Would you be so kind as to ask them to leave their position outside my door?" he asked me from the kitchen.

    I peeped out through the peep hole, and could see a woman in a red wool coat. She was speaking to someone who seemed to be rather short and leaning against the door, as when I looked through the keyhole, something blocked it. I couldn't understand the language they spoke, but the woman in the red coat seemed Oriental. All I could see of who she spoke to was a foot sticking out, as if the person leaning against the door was sat on the floor with her feet out.

    I coughed as loudly as I could, really a clearing of my throat rather than a cough, but the red-coated woman and her friend didn't seem to take the hint. So, I eased the door open, in case the person leaning against it had her weight on it. The door opened inward. As soon as I had opened the door, the woman leaning against it stood up, and grabbed the door frame.

    "Can I help you?" I had begun to ask, but this woman, maybe 40 years old, I thought, and like her friend, with Oriental features, began to try to force herself into the flat, holding on to the door frame and trying to pull herself in. What was preventing her was me blocking the door and her friend pulling on her other arm.

    "Close the door!" her friend shouted. I would have happily complied, except that her mad friend, who hadn't uttered one word, just a very intense and frightening look, still had hold of the door frame, and I would have broken all the fingers on her right hand if I had shut it.

    "What's going on out there?" Diether called from the kitchen.

    This seemed to spur this woman to get in even more, and I couldn't answer him, having to concentrate on keeping myself upright as she tried to bowl through me and into the apartment.

    "Stop!" I yelled, but it was no use, she kept trying to get through me.

    "Stop right now, or I call the police," I tried again, still to no avail.

    "Stop or I slam the door and break all your fingers," I tried again. Her friend then shouted something at her in a language that I didn't understand.

    Right at about that point, Diether came out of the kitchen to see what the commotion was.

    The woman trying to get into the flat stopped dead, and spoke for the first since I opened the door.

    "Diether!"

    "Nat!" said Diether, "Mein Gott! Was machen sie hier?" That I did understand, though I am not sure she did, as she just repeated his name again.

    Diether shoved past me, and embraced the woman, who began to sob. I and the other woman just stood staring, as they embraced, she with her face buried in his chest, and silently racked with tears. After a bit of that, Diether moved her into the living room, to the sofa, and the other woman followed us in to the apartment.

    It transpired that Diether had lived, as part of some kind of German international development program, in Thailand for what was supposed to be one year. He had lived with a host family, and Nat had been his host sister. Pat, the other woman, was her older sister, and had already left home and married an Englishman by that time. On this evening, she had been trying to convince her younger sister to drop things, as it was mad trying to get back with someone thirty years later. Her arguments were the ones I had heard outside the door prior to opening it, but had been to no avail.

    I didn't find out the details until later, but Diether and Nat had fallen in love. Her father, who was someone rather important in the Thai government, found out about this, and promptly had Diether sent home to Germany, with a strict order to keep away from his daughter. Neither of them said it, but it seems that they were completely in love, and both suffered broken hearts.

    Probably because they were young, both ended up getting over things, getting on with their lives, getting married, and having families. Except that she, apparently, hadn't gotten over Diether, and when her husband, who was somewhat older than her, suddenly died, she had gone to England to see her sister. Considering her state that day at the door, I am guessing that her mental state had been fragile.

    Nat did speak English, and later we had many long conversations. She told me that her English had been one of the reasons that Diether had initially become so close to her: She was the only one in her family who spoke English. Diether hadn't spoken any Thai, and hadn't tried to learn at all. He had decided that he would improve his English, which was a lot more useful than Thai. This refusal to learn the language had meant that he came to depend on Nat's English ability. His world was somewhat limited by his rather stubborn and arrogant view of the place he lived in, Nat told me, but that had been ok with her: He had been all hers.

    Her passion was tennis. She and Diether had gone to the country club nearly every day, and I asked her whether Diether had played tennis.

    "No," she laughed, "along with not speaking Thai, Diether did NOT play tennis. Believe me, I asked. He preferred swimming, he said. I couldn't get him to even try tennis."

    Nat was an attractive woman, even at 47 years old. She had kept fit, and had kept a youthful air about her, almost childlike in manners. She was, after the initial impression of mental instability had worn off, a very nice, lively woman.

    But I am getting ahead a bit. We were still in Diether's apartment, the four of us, Nat still recovering, Pat and I stood looking on like uncomfortable spectators. Diether, ever the gracious host, got up and asked me to set the table for an additional two. We had dinner, and as usual Diether's Spanish dishes were lovely, but to be honest, on this occasion I am not sure any of us derived the full enjoyment out of the food.

    It fell to me, the Englishman, to make polite conversation during the meal. I was still very much unsure about what had occurred, and therefore stuck to those subjects that every Englishman learns to speak of ad nauseum.

    "So, it was quite a nice day today, wasn't it? Hoping for a bit of sun tomorrow as well, knock on wood."

    "Yes, that would be lovely," said Pat.

    Silence.

    "So, assuming the weather holds, what will you be up to tomorrow, then?" I ask.

    Not a good question, as it depended on a resolution to the question of what her younger sister would be doing next. Chatter about football and jokes about politics followed, but the air was constrained, I think everyone thinking the same thing: 'What next?'

    In a funny way, that question was answered by Diether: He had to go to work. That is one of the aspects of dinner with him, that he has to finish by 9 and then go off to work, except on Friday, which he had off. It was a Sunday. He had never, he told me, missed work, in the 33 years he had been working. On this occasion, it meant that Diether was able to offer Nat and Pat accommodation for the night, and leave the awkward situation until the next day to sort out.

    I took my leave, but called him the next day to check up that everything was ok. He wouldn't say anything besides "I am dealing with things. I will let you know if I need any help."

I called back about a week later, when I hadn't heard from him, and he was equally cryptic, but suggested we meet up at the club. I went early, and expected to see Diether in the pool, as that was what we usually did: Plan to meet at three for a coffee, but actually see each other in the pool beforehand. This time, though he wasn't in the pool, and I did not see him, in fact, until I came out of the shower after my swim. He came in to the locker room from the club side, dressed not, as was usual, in Speedo and swim cap, but in tennis whites.