Swimming to Ithaca (15 page)

‘Why do they do that kind of thing?’ Nicos asked plaintively.

‘Looking for EOKA, mate,’ Cox replied. ‘It’s your lot’s fault.’

There was something of the atmosphere of a hospital about Nicosia Airport, a dirty, overcrowded hospital: the anonymity, the indifference, the same concern with one’s own affairs and lack of concern about others, the same isolation and sense of loss. Dee delivered Tom to an air hostess who wore the brittle smile of a nurse. She watched the pair go through the gates as one might watch someone being wheeled into the operating theatre. When the two of them were lost in the crowd beyond the barriers she returned to the car alone.

Cox was leaning against the front wing of the vehicle talking to Nicos. When he saw her approaching he stubbed out a cigarette and stood to some kind of attention, as though he didn’t really know how to behave when he was out of uniform and dealing with a civilian. ‘Everything all right, ma’am?’

Of course everything was all right. Nicos held the back door open for her, and she stood uncertainly for a moment, looking in at the empty seat. Suddenly everything was not all right. Her eyes stung. The dust, maybe. Out on the concrete, beyond the barbed wire and the airport buildings, an aircraft was manoeuvring for take-off, its engines rising in pitch to what seemed like a cry of anguish. It wasn’t a cry of anything, of course. It was mere noise with no meaning at all. But she made it mean something: it was her cry of anguish for the loss of her son. They stood and watched as the aircraft – a Viscount painted in the red and silver of British European Airways – turned at the head of the runway and held itself tensioned against the brakes. There was that pause, the rising pitch of the engines, and then its sudden movement down the runway, gathering pace, trading one element for another, rising up off the tarmac and into the air, climbing up into the blue sky, diminishing.

Nicos bent towards her. ‘You OK, Mrs Denham?’ His hand was on her arm and there was a sudden and surprising dismantling of the barriers that lay between them. ‘Hey, we don’t want to spoil a pretty face. Here, you take this.’ He produced a white handkerchief from his pocket and handed it to her.

She dabbed at her eyes, and then looked at the handkerchief and saw that it was black with mascara. ‘I’m awfully sorry. I—’

‘That’s quite all right. Part of the service.’

She almost laughed despite the tears. ‘Phaedon Taxis at your command?’

‘That’s right. Difficult customers catered for. Specially pretty ones.’ The aircraft was small now, something distant, a crucifix in the sky, turning over the mountains and setting course for England.

‘There,’ Nicos said. ‘He’ll be OK, Mrs D, you mark my words. He’ll be OK.’ He put a protective hand on her head as she ducked into the car, almost as though he was delivering a
benediction. ‘Mrs D,’ he asked when she had settled into the seat, ‘why aren’t all Englishwomen like you?’

She smiled up at him. ‘What on earth do you mean by that?’

He frowned. ‘You
feel
. That’s Greek.’

‘All Englishwomen feel,’ she said. ‘They just don’t always show it. They think it’s a sign of weakness.’

The journey back was uneventful. Cox slept, his head weaving from side to side with the motion of the car. Was he thus sleeping on duty, and did this constitute some heinous breach of military discipline? Dee felt dreadfully alone in the back seat, almost as though she were a mourner returning from a funeral. She tried to imagine Tom in the aircraft, flying high over Europe; but she had never flown herself and her imagination failed her: he was merely absent, and she was bereft.

When they reached Limassol, they dropped Cox off at his camp, out in the wasted suburbs of the city, and then continued home. Sixteenth of June Street was deserted. There was something dispiriting about the rows of random concrete houses, the garish blooms of bougainvillaea, the dusty palm trees. Nicos brought the car to a halt outside the gate. ‘You all alone here, Mrs Denham?’

‘My husband doesn’t get back from work until late.’ It was like admitting to something shameful.

‘Well, how about you come back to our place for a coffee? Meet the family, see that Greek Cypriots aren’t all monsters.’

‘I never thought they were.’

‘That Cox fellow did. Couldn’t make me out, the fact that I speak English as good as him.’ He paused. ‘How about it? We’re only just round the corner.’

There was something endearing about his attitude. Living in the circumscribed world of the military, where people knew each other’s ranks as though by instinct and each wife acquired a reflected status that mattered every bit as much as her husband’s,
it was refreshing to discover this London lad who couldn’t give a damn. ‘Thank you very much,’ she said. ‘I’d like that.’

They drove a few streets away to where a sign on one of the buildings proclaimed
PHAEDON TAXIS
. The family apartment was above the garages. It had wide, impersonal rooms and glistening marble floors. There were gilt mirrors on the wall, a sideboard like something from a church sacristy, ornate armchairs of exquisite discomfort. Ancestral faces gazed down from the walls like icons in a church – a grandfather who had been mayor of the city, a great-uncle who had worked for the Health Department in the 1920s, a cousin who was a bishop, a more remote ancestor who, sporting moustache and tarbush, had been in business during the Ottoman period. ‘All right, in’t it?’ said Nicos with pride. ‘Darn sight better than Enfield, I can tell you.’

She sat with him at the kitchen table beneath a circling fan, with Archbishop Makarios gazing benevolently down on them from above the cooker. Nicos’ aunt made coffee, while his grandmother nodded and grinned toothlessly from a chair in the corner. ‘
Endaxi
,’ she kept saying. ‘
Endaxi
.’ Two little girls came and gazed with wide eyes at the English lady sitting primly on her straight-backed chair.

Where would Tom be now? Dee wondered. Somewhere over Europe. Impossible to imagine, suspended in the air in a steel tube. Alone.

On the stove the coffee seethed and died, seethed and died. The thick black liquid was presented to the English lady along with a glass of water and a bowl of fruit in syrup. ‘
Glyká
,’ said the aunt. ‘Eat, eat. This red cherry, this orange. This one’ – she pointed to a small, glistening black slug – ‘this one
vazanaki
, this one’ – a small, dried turd, perhaps from a cat, perhaps from a small dog – ‘
karydhi
. Very good.’

Dee regarded them with alarm.

‘Don’t know what you call them,’ Nicos admitted. ‘Thems are walnuts, I think. Not the sort of thing you get in England, eh?’

She sipped and nibbled, and showed polite enthusiasm. Nicos seemed pleased by her approval. He talked to distract her. His interests were pop music and cinema. Music especially. ‘I used to go down the dance halls in Tottenham – the Mecca and the Royal. Y’know what I mean? Jive, and that. D’you know how to jive?’

She didn’t. But sometimes people did it in the mess, at parties.

What about rock ’n’ roll?

Only what she’d seen on the Pathé News, at the cinema. That Bill Haley fellow.

He laughed. ‘Bill Haley? He’s an old man. Past it. You should listen to Eddie Cochran and Buddy Holly and cats like that.’

Cats?

Again that laugh, a rough, derisive sound. And then, quite suddenly – it was as much a surprise to herself as it was to anyone – she was in tears. Sitting there on one of those wooden chairs with a rush seat, just like Van Gogh had in his room at Arles, and weeping. Tears running down her cheeks.

‘
Po, po, po!
’ the aunt exclaimed, while Nicos crouched down and dabbed at her cheeks with his handkerchief. ‘What’s up?’ he asked. ‘Aren’t you feeling well?’

‘It’s all right.’ She shook her head. ‘Please don’t fuss.’

But they did fuss, of course they fussed, the aunt running round the kitchen for whatever it was that cured tears, the old crone cackling in the corner, the little girls holding their faces. Nicos clapped his hands and said something that made the women disappear, and they were alone, just the two of them in the bare, comfortless kitchen. He brushed an errant strand of hair away from her face, stroked her cheek. He seemed to have metamorphosed into something new – the brother she had
never had, perhaps. ‘It’s just Tom,’ she whispered. ‘I just thought of him, that’s all.’

‘He’s all right, Tom is. A big, tough lad.’

‘He’s just a child and he’s all on his own and he should be here with me.’

‘You’d be surprised how tough they are. Kids on their own, I mean. I should know. Hey, you want to use the bathroom, Mrs D? Wash and make up and stuff? Make yourself look all grownup again.’

She managed a laugh. ‘I’m must seem awfully feeble, crying like this.’

‘What’s feeble about it? We’re not afraid of crying here. That’s one of the things we find difficult with the English. I told you, didn’t I? They don’t show their feelings. But you do and that’s all right. Now you go to the bathroom and put yourself to rights, and I’ll drive you home when you’re ready. OK?’

‘OK.’

He touched her cheek again. His fingertips seemed surprisingly delicate, like a woman’s. ‘Come on, I’ll show you where.’

Like everything else in this apartment, the bathroom was vast, as though it belonged to some institution, a boarding school or a clinic. There was a glass shelf with a bar of Lifebuoy soap and a tin of shaving cream and a shaving brush just like the ones her father used. Badger’s hair. Did Nicos use things like that? Or perhaps Stavros. She closed the door, thankful to be alone, fearful of stepping back outside into an alien world where people watched her and noted things and judged. A strained and flushed face stared back at her from the mirror. She ran some water and splashed her eyes, then patted her skin dry and tried to fix her make-up. The misery had subsided. She didn’t look too bad. Slightly aggressive now, making a face at herself in the glass. Tough and Yorkshire. Cautiously she opened the door and ventured out.

‘You look wonderful, Mrs D,’ Nicos exclaimed when she appeared at the kitchen door. The aunt was there beaming, and the two little girls, and the old grandmother, all of them waiting as though they had been set up as the chorus in some ghastly Greek comedy, to provide assurance and agreement.
Kaló
, they said.
Kaló
. Or something like that. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, and the old crone said ‘
Po
,
po
,
po!
’ and the girls laughed and the aunt said that it didn’t matter, it was nothing, what can you expect when a mother says goodbye to her son on an aircraft, an
aircraft
of all things?
Aeroplano
. And then the door opened and Dee looked round, and Stavros of the large belly and small feet came in. He paused in surprise, seeing a British woman sitting there. ‘My lady!’ he exclaimed. ‘You are welcome beneath my roof. I hope they have looked after you.’

‘They’ve been wonderful,’ she said, and at that moment she felt an affection for them, a genuine, familial affection which was, a small part of her whispered, quite unwarranted.

It was when she was going, when they were just about to get into the car, that the camera was produced. She stood awkwardly beside Nicos in front of the car, while his uncle manipulated shutter speed and aperture. ‘Photography is Greek word,’ he said proudly. ‘
Photo
-
grapho
. Light-write. That is what it mean.’

The shutter clicked.

Thomas emerges from the tube on to the concourse of the mainline station, and there she is, standing beneath the departures board. A tide of passengers ebbs and flows past her but she remains still, a pale and steady flame emitting the faint smoke of a cigarette.

‘Hi,’ he calls.

She turns. The flash of relief that lights her face is extinguished so rapidly that Thomas isn’t sure whether it was even there in the first place. ‘Oh, it’s you.’ She tosses her cigarette on the ground and treads on it. ‘The train’s in five minutes. I thought you were going to be late.’

‘I thought you’d given up smoking.’

‘Not when I’m nervous.’

It’s an awkward moment. They don’t quite know how to do this. He takes her hands and leans forward to kiss her on the cheek, which is the first contact they have had since that hastily
snatched kiss on the pavement outside Covent Garden tube station after the matinée of
Cats
. Overhead, the station names and train times whirr and clatter like dominoes.

‘How’s Emma?’

‘She’s fine. She likes going with her gran.’

Gran. His mother used to assess the whole gamut of abbreviations: Grandmamma, Grandma, Granny – a dying fall of social acceptability. Gran was almost at the bottom. Holding hands for the first time and self-consciously, they set off for the platform.

The train traipses eastwards out of the city. Stepney and West Ham give way to Barking and Romford, drab terraces and tower blocks making room for housing estates and factories and, finally, grey fields of clay. Kale sits opposite him with her legs drawn up under her and her body half turned so that she can look out at the Essex flatland. ‘When I was a kid we came to the seaside this way,’ she says.

‘Clacton?’

‘Frinton. My Mum said it has more class than Clacton.’ She smiles suddenly. An epiphany, when she smiles. ‘I should take Emms. She’d love it.’

‘We’ll do that then. Next time, when the weather’s decent. Frinton, with Emma.’

‘That’d be nice.’ And then the smile goes and she is looking out again and not saying much, just biting at the inside of her lip while passengers push past up the aisle. Two rows away a couple are bickering, the fracture lines of a relationship open to public view.

‘What’s up?’ Thomas asks.

Kale turns. ‘Just thinking.’

‘What about?’

‘Things.’ Her words might be evasive but her eyes have a
remarkable candour. They catch his gaze and throw it back. Her pupils are wide, almost to the limits of her irises.

‘You aren’t having second thoughts, are you?’

‘What d’you mean?’