Swimming to Ithaca (19 page)

There was a moment of pushing and shoving near the doorway as he tried to get through. ‘Hey Nick, where you going?’ one of the soldiers said. ‘Off to report to your EOKA friends?’ Dee saw him look round, his expression somewhere between fear and anger. ‘Hey!’ she cried out. ‘Stop that.’ She leaped up and went over to them, pushing her way between the men and Nicos, her figure a sudden, fragile barrier. From behind the counter Marjorie’s voice was surprisingly sharp, almost military. ‘Corporal! I will report you as responsible for any misbehaviour.’

The corporal said something – ‘Let it go,’ or something like that – and the scuffling died away. With a backward glance at Dee, Nicos went out into the sunlight, while the men sat down.

‘I’ll have no nonsense in here, you mark my words,’ Marjorie told them. ‘If you can’t be hospitable to others, then we won’t be
hospitable to you.’ She had the tone of a headmistress talking to her prefects. The soldiers shifted on their chairs and grinned sheepishly. Dee and Marjorie set to work, taking orders, making sandwiches and pots of tea. A couple of the squaddies ordered sausage and mash.

‘They’re just kids, bless them,’ said Marjorie as she and Dee worked. ‘They wouldn’t really hurt a fly.’

‘I thought that was their job, to hurt flies and things.’

‘Don’t be silly. They’re just kids away from home wanting a bit of fun. You’re rather fond of him, aren’t you?’

‘Who? Nicos?’

‘Who do you think? You were up there like a terrier to defend him.’

Dee smiled. ‘He reminds me of someone I once knew. Years ago, during the war. I don’t know what it is, exactly.’

Marjorie smiled slyly. ‘An old flame?’

‘My only flame before Edward. It didn’t burn for very long: extinguished by the Arctic Ocean, actually. He was in the Merchant Navy. He …’ She stopped. She didn’t want to say any more. In fact she was uncertain why she had even told Marjorie as much as she had. ‘Nothing, really. Just a childhood romance. I was only seventeen.’

Marjorie was dishing out sausages on to plates, slapping mashed potatoes beside them. ‘Well poor old Nick’s certainly soft on you.’

‘Marjorie, you’re being daft. I’m old enough to be his mother.’

‘I don’t think so. Older sister maybe. But that’s not how he sees it. I can recognize the signs well enough, my dear. Look at all these lads. Young boys, away from home just like your Nick—’

‘He is
not
“my” Nick.’

The older woman laughed. ‘The trouble is, he thinks he is.
When you bring him in here, he never takes his eyes off you. You be careful, that’s all I’m saying.’

‘You sound like my Aunt Vera.’

‘She’s probably a very wise woman.’

When she was out of sight of Marjorie she took the photo out of her apron pocket and looked at it. My Nick, she thought with a smile. That faint smile, part amused, part questioning. Charteris.

W
inter came, with cold winds from the Anatolian Mountains and a scattering of snow on the heights of Troödos. Throughout the summer the mountains had been hidden from the city by a haze of heat but now they were plainly there, shouldering up into the cold air, their flanks draped with forest, the tops painted with white. Now, when the Denhams drove up the winding road to Platres with Binty and Douglas and Geoffrey, they took coats and woollen hats and gloves. The children threw snowballs at each other and cried for the pain of cold fingers while the wind battered their ears and soughed through the girders of the radio masts that crowned the summit. There was a cold that Dee hadn’t felt since arriving on the island eight months earlier: cold as a substance, a fluid permeating the bones. It reminded her of the Peaks in the first snows, Kinder Scout and Bleaklow. When she told Geoffrey he laughed. He’d never been north of Peterborough, so he claimed.

‘Kinder Scout was where they had the mass trespass in the nineteen-thirties,’ she told him. ‘You must know about that.’ Surely he knew, surely he had heard about it. He was just being obtuse. She felt almost cross about it. He was a typical bloody
southerner! ‘Workers demanded access to the moors and the landlords denied them. The gamekeepers fought to keep them out.’

‘Workers against landlords? Sounds like a piece of socialist mythology.’

‘My father was part of the Sheffield contingent. They took the train up to Hope—’

‘Hope?’

‘It’s a village. Pretty name, isn’t it? The hills above it are called Win and Lose. Northern humour, I suppose. The Sheffield party walked over the hills to meet the group from Manchester but they were late and they had to watch the battle with the gamekeepers from the top of Jacob’s Ladder. Father always says that he was disappointed not to be in the fight; Mother says he was well out of it.’

‘Sounds quite a character, your old man.’

‘He’s a typical Yorkshireman. Loves cricket and rugby league and a political argument.’

‘Is he Communist?’ The aerials overhead moaned in the wind, as though they were straining with the effort of listening. They
were
listening, of course. They were peering over the far horizon, over the Taurus Mountains and the Anatolian Plains, gazing across the Black Sea into the heart of the Soviet empire.

‘Am I being vetted, Geoffrey?’

He laughed. ‘D’you know, the only Greek Cypriots I feel really sorry for are the Communists? They’re the only ones who want to throw out all this factional nonsense and join forces with the Turks, and EOKA has killed more of them than it has us. Did you know that?’

‘You haven’t answered my question.’

‘I’m just trying to find out where you stand.’

‘What’s it to do with my father, then? He’s just an old-fashioned socialist.’

‘And you?’

‘Well, I’ve always voted Labour, if that’s what you mean. My whole family has.’ She paused. ‘I
am
being vetted.’

‘Get a move on!’ Edward called. ‘What the hell’s keeping you?’ He had gone on ahead and was fiddling with his camera, adjusting the aperture, pointing it at them as they came across the summit.

‘Dee’s giving me her family history,’ Geoffrey called back.

‘Her father can argue the hind legs off a pit pony. Has she told you that?’

‘More or less.’

‘And he thinks Anthony Eden is the embodiment of evil.’

The picture was taken and they followed Edward down to where the cars were parked. In the relative warmth of Platres they found a café that served tea and cakes. It was just like coming off the moors and discovering a place where you could get a large stoneware pot of tea, and home-made scones and jam. The children fought and bickered, while Geoffrey expounded his views on the island. And she thought of Charteris, of how one Sunday he’d borrowed a car and they’d driven up to Hope village. ‘Which do we climb?’ he had asked as they stood on the road and looked up at the twin hills to the north of the village. ‘Win or Lose?’

Of course they chose Win, and when they had slogged up to the top they stood there clinging to each other in the wind, looking down on to the Ladybower reservoir, laughing and crying at the same time. It had been a day like this, more or less – cold and clear, with a view for miles and miles, and the wind battering them. The last weekend, before he went away.

The last time she ever saw him, in fact.

In the café in Platres she laughed along with the others; but no one understood that she was not laughing at Geoffrey’s outrageous
jokes. She was laughing at the name of the hill. Win, indeed. They had surely climbed Lose.

Persephone

The goddess of the world has crossed Lethe.

Her scent, of myrtle and jessamine,

Is long gone; and with her passage

All memory of spring’s effulgent blooming

Vanishes:

Hyacinth is drowned,

Myosotis is forgotten,

Anemone, the wind flower,

Is blown away by gales.

Dog rose and dog violet

Are thrown to the dogs.

Now candles gutter in the wind

And Olympos stands against the sky

Draped in a winding sheet –

Like an old man at his own funeral.

If Zeus is still king, he doesn’t show it;

Hades rules now.

Geoffrey wrote it for her, typed it on a sheet of paper and dedicated it across the top in his own hand:
For Dee, with affection
. Edward laughed. ‘Going about with one of his poems tucked down your front? He’ll make a fool of you if you’re not careful.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Poor old Geoff’s a bit starved of female company these days. He’s got his eye on you, my dear.’

She felt a surge of anger. ‘Can’t you understand friendship?’ she said.

‘I can,’ he said, ‘but can he?’

In those winter days Dee felt herself drifting away from Edward, the slow, tidal drift of flotsam in the stream. Partly it was his work that was to blame, of course; but it was more than that. Difficult to put your finger on. Perhaps secrets had something to do with it. Perhaps he had secrets; certainly she did, a whole population of thoughts and ideas whispering to her, hinting, accusing, such a world of things inside her head. Hidden dreams, and none of them known to anyone else; sometimes, not even to herself.

Tom can hear his parents arguing. Argument has become part of their life together; probably – he’s unsure of this – part of everyone’s shared life. But if this is what sharing your life is like, he doesn’t want to join in. ‘Stop arguing!’ he shouts at them, and sometimes that works and the row fades away to a sullen resentment; but often, all too often nowadays, his imprecation gets thrown back at him. By her. ‘Just mind your own business,’ she tells him. ‘This is nothing to do with you. This is grown-ups.’

It is, he thinks, she who initiates the arguments. His father is passive in the face of his mother’s anger,
ergo
he is not guilty. His mother started the row. She is to blame. Tom lives in a blame world and it seems only logical to apportion blame. That is how school works. ‘Who did it?’ is the great, accusatory question. He has, on occasion, owned up to things he did not do, so overwhelming is the sense of guilt. Once or twice he has even been beaten for what he has not done, the cane cutting across his backside through the thin stuff of his pyjamas with a shock that is electric in its intensity. In the dormitory afterwards they compare strokes of blue and mauve scored across pale, fragile buttocks.

Fragments of memory, pieces that once made a whole incident
complete with cause, effect, conclusion, but are now just dissociated splinters, like shards of brightly coloured glass: she shouts at him about something – answering back? Not tidying his room? Teasing Paula? What else could it be? – and emerges from the bathroom to berate him. She has been getting ready to go out and his offence is grave enough to interrupt this preparation.

‘Do what you’re told! Don’t argue with me, just do as you’re damn well told!’

She’s standing there in the corridor, wrapped in a towel, her legs and feet white, the tattoo blue of veins visible through fine skin. She has the towel draped across her front, propped against her breasts, hiding her belly, dropping down to her knees. ‘Don’t argue! Just do it!’

She turns to her toilet, and there is a moment – a mere microsecond trapped for ever like a fly in the amber of his memory – when the tail of the towel sways outwards and he has a glimpse of the front of her thighs and her loose belly.

Has she noticed? She returns to her room, rearranging her grip on the towel to hold it together across her backside. She grabs and misses and the towel is open, and he can see her buttocks, uncrossed by cane strokes, soft and white and vulnerable, moving with her stride, and the tapering pillars of her thighs, and the tendons at the back of her knees where the skin is folded awkwardly and the veins run smoky blue. And the cleft between the buttocks which curves round to the other side and makes a fold like Paula’s. But he knows now that, unlike Paula’s, there is hair. Rumour has become fact. He has seen it. That’s where he came from.

B
eating retreat on the parade ground at the garrison at Dhekelia, in the east of the island. The Powells had invited them. Apparently it was a celebration of the Battle of Isandlwana
in the Zulu War, when Bill’s regiment had been cut down to a man. There were buglers and the regimental colours paraded, and soldiers stamping their feet and marching and wheeling like machines. The band played ‘Rule Britannia’ and ‘Land of Hope and Glory’, and the Union Jack flew over the scene and made you feel quite emotional. General Kendrew took the salute as the battalion doubled past the podium to the sound of ‘The Keel Row’. ‘Anyone can celebrate a victory,’ Bill explained proudly. ‘It takes real art to celebrate a defeat.’

Afterwards there was a reception in the mess. Stewards cruised among the guests with trays of glasses. Regimental silver gleamed behind the buffet – a gilt tiger stalking an ebony sepoy through the jungle, a silver palm tree shading dying silver infantrymen, sconces and plates inscribed with names of forgotten battles like Savandroog and Khulamba. Dee wondered whether Damien would be there, and what would happen if he was, and how she would feel and how he would react. She hadn’t seen him since the party they had given at the end of summer, hadn’t even heard from him, except to receive a note of thanks. Perhaps he had been posted away. Perhaps he was not even on the island any longer. Would he, she wondered, have contacted her to tell her that?

And then, amidst the crush of people at the buffet, she found herself standing beside him, mere inches away. He was in mess kit – tight red jacket and narrow blue trousers, like a toy solider in a playroom.

‘We’re bloody piggy in the middle,’ he was complaining to someone out of sight beyond him. ‘It’s not proper soldiering at all. One side throws rocks at the other and the other throws them back, we get it all in the neck.’

‘Are you talking about the buffet?’ Dee asked.

He turned. For a palpable moment he seemed shocked to discover her there beside him. Then he laughed, almost with
relief. ‘Politics, I’m afraid. How wonderful to see you. How are you? How are the children? And Edward? Is he around?’