Swimming to Ithaca (21 page)

‘People might hear.’

‘There aren’t any people to hear. I almost said all this at your party but I didn’t quite have the guts, and I wanted to say it at that bloody do at the mess, but I couldn’t. And Sarah was there anyway, which made it difficult. But now I
am
saying it, so bloody well listen, hidden dreamer. I love you and I want to take you away from your husband and I want to divorce my wife. And I want to marry you and be with you for the rest of my life. There, I’ve said it. And you might tell me to piss off, but still I’ve said it and now I can die a happy man.’

She took her hand back carefully, in case he might crush it. Hers was light and fragile; his was strong, the fingers and the back brushed with hair, the nails cut short and square. And she wondered what that hand had done, where it had been. She saw it hooked around the trigger of some ugly weapon, a Lee-Enfield
or whatever it was they used nowadays. A Bren gun, a Webley pistol, a Sterling. She saw it touching his wife’s body, going down over her belly and into the dense thicket of pale hair. She felt it touch her own body, inside her, just as she had imagined it that night on the
Empire Bude
. She shivered, as though he had actually done it, touched something at the quick of her. ‘I thought you were a Catholic,’ she said. ‘I thought Catholics couldn’t get divorced.’

‘They can get a civil divorce.’

‘It doesn’t sound very civil to me.’

‘Is that all you’ve got to say?’

‘It’s taken me aback, really. I could hardly have expected all this, could I?’

‘Well, what
were
you expecting? Deep in your cold, cold heart, you love me too. Don’t you?’

She felt a tremor inside her. It was something beyond control, something contingent, like a disease. ‘I don’t know what I think,’ she said. ‘I think you’re being daft, and I don’t think it would help if I were to be daft as well.’

‘But you’d like to be?’

‘I didn’t say that.’

Damien made a small exhalation of breath that may have been a sarcastic laugh, may have been an expression of pain. He sipped his drink and shifted in his chair to look out towards the sea where a ship was waiting in the roads, just as the
Empire Bude
had waited to disembark her passengers all that time ago. Further out a naval frigate was steaming past, its white ensign clipped by the breeze, its black guns fingering the air fore and aft. It was on patrol for smugglers, looking for the caiques that brought in arms and ammunition to EOKA, and Grivas’ insulin. ‘I’ve discussed it with Sarah,’ he said.

‘You’ve discussed what with Sarah?’

‘I told her. About my feeling for you.’

‘You’ve
what
?’

‘Oh, not by name, but in principle. Actually, I think she guessed. “Have I met her?” she asked. I admitted that she had. Briefly, I said, and she smiled and said, “Pretty little wifey.” I’m not sure whether it was a question or a statement.’

‘It sounds patronizing, whichever it was.’

‘She is patronizing. So what do we do about it?’

Dee shook her head. ‘Nothing. You’ve done enough as it is, merely by saying what you’ve said. You aren’t really going to abandon your family, are you? I certainly couldn’t love you if I thought you might. It wouldn’t be a lovable thing, would it, for me to abandon Tom or Paula, or you to abandon your daughters? It’s not the kind of thing either of us would do.’

‘So what
is
the kind of thing we do?’

‘Right now the kind of thing we do is, we have our drink and then I go on to Marjorie’s,’ she said quietly.

‘I’ll take you in the car.’

‘Don’t be silly. Marjorie’s is only just along the front.’

‘Let me take you for a spin.’

‘Damien, please.’

‘I need to be alone with you.’

She closed her eyes. ‘Damien, please,’ she repeated quietly. ‘Don’t you see how impossible it all is?’

Kale has no history. She has a present, but no past. No father, no aunts, no uncles, no cousins. There was a man who lived with them for a while, when they were in Tottenham. ‘I called him Uncle, but he wasn’t. It’s always Uncle, isn’t it? Uncle Ronald. Then he pushed off and we were on our own, apart from my mum’s boyfriends. Quite a few of those,’ she adds with a small sting of irony. She has no past, no roots. ‘We never really belonged nowhere. Anywhere. Never belonged anywhere. I mean, London, yes. But what’s that mean these days? And we moved a lot – Walthamstow, Tottenham, a couple of years in Wood Green, and then south of the river. Mum’s not a Londoner herself, though. She was born in Birmingham. Came to London when she was sixteen. But when I ask her about family, well, she just sort of avoids the question. Know what I mean?’

He doesn’t, really. He and Paula have family – their mother’s
relations in Yorkshire, cousins of his father in Hampshire. They don’t see them much, but they’re there to provide some kind of reference, some sense of being knitted into the warp and weft of Britain in the twentieth century. Is Kale’s type the future? Freedom from history. You just are. You have no reason and no context.

‘What about your father?’

She shrugs. ‘He pushed off when I was three. That’s what Mum says. I don’t remember.’ Her look seems to ambush him, a hard light of intelligence shining through the stunted education. ‘Family history’s a bit of a luxury, isn’t it?’

‘I suppose it is.’

Their disparate present lives barely overlap, like circles in a Venn diagram describing some logical but unsolved puzzle. How to increase the degree of intersection? How to pull her closer? And what other unperceived circles intersect with hers? There’s one marked ‘Steve’, and another with her mother’s name, and one with Emma’s, of course. But what others? He doesn’t know. He has slept with her and yet all he knows is the detail of her, the curves and interstices. She will be standing there beside him, wearing jeans and a scrap of T-shirt, and he knows all the things you can’t see – the curl of her strange, bifurcate toes, the precise shape of her kneecaps, the rough nest of her body hair, the hang of her breasts and the dark shadows in her axillae; all these things, but not her, the surface, but not the substance.

They have lunch together on the days when Kale is in college. Sometimes she is amused by him, sometimes evasive and distracted. When she is amused it makes him happy: it suggests a degree of intimacy, something shared. On the other occasions Thomas wonders whether she is thinking of the boyfriend.

‘Tell me about him.’

‘I don’t want to.’

‘Are you still with him?’

‘I told you, we’ve broken up. Shall we talk about something else?’

One Saturday they meet in Hyde Park and take Emma to the Natural History Museum. Emma holds their hands and swings between them as she did when they went to the theatre. ‘Stop it, Emms,’ her mother snaps. But Thomas loves this illusion of paternity, of being a family, possessing and being possessed. They pass through the great doors into the nave of the building, almost like entering a cathedral. Dinosaur skeletons, not saints, peer down at them from the shadows. Emma squints up at the monsters and asks, ‘Are we frightened, Mum?’ and Kale decides that no, we aren’t really frightened; but we are just a bit nervous.

‘What’s nervous?’

‘Nervous is being afraid without really knowing it.’

Thomas is afraid without knowing it. He’s afraid of loss. He’s afraid that she may decide, on a whim, that that’s it, it’s all over, whatever has barely started is now finished. Emma watches the dinosaurs, Kale watches Emma, he watches her, loving the sight of her, the articulate movements of her body, the set of her head, the thoughtful frown as she concentrates to read one of the information cards to her daughter.

After the museum they have a meal – Kale calls it ‘tea’ – at a hamburger place that is all red neon and yellow plastic flowers. ‘Why don’t you come back with us?’ Emma asks Thomas when the meal is over and it is time to go. He smiles on her as an ally in his covert, urgent battle.

‘Thomas has his own home,’ her mother explains.

‘Let’s go to his home, then.’

‘ ’Fraid we can’t, Emms. We got to get back.’
Go’ uh ge’ ba’
– a dance of glottal stops. What she has to get back for, Thomas doesn’t know. She answers the phone in some office for single mothers; she works part-time at the Brixton Library, cataloguing;
she helps out in a café of some kind. Those little bits of others’ lives that intersect with hers. They walk together as far as the tube station and she gives him a quick, tantalizing kiss before vanishing with her daughter down into the bowels of the underground once more. Persephone.

T
wo days later he is standing at the window of his office high up in the Arts block when he catches sight of her far below on the concourse of the university: a tiny figure that is yet instantly recognizable. She is with a man. At least, the man is talking to her. From on high Thomas watches. They are talking, urgently, even argumentatively. He can tell by the gestures, the insistent pointing of the man’s finger, the set of her feet, the way she turns away and he grabs her by the arm and twists her back to face him. For a second he wonders whether there is going to be violence, and he will be forced to watch, helplessly, from seven storeys up. And then she has shaken herself free and walked towards the entrance of the building below his viewpoint. The man stands watching.

Thomas hurries to the lift and descends to the ground floor. There is no sign of Kale in the reception area. He goes out to the concourse. Two students are handing out leaflets protesting against the poll tax. A couple of tourists are seated on a bench, consulting a map that is folded to the wrong page. People come and go. One of them – a colleague in the Department of Philosophy – greets him as he passes. But there is no sign of Kale, and no man who might have been talking to her, no man called Steve. He returns to the seventh floor and as he passes the offices the secretary calls out to him. ‘That Kale Macintosh left this for you.’ She is holding out some handwritten sheets of paper: an essay, due in two days ago.

‘Where did she go?’

‘She just handed it to me and went back down.’

‘The lifts must have crossed.’

The woman regards him with dry amusement. She is an ally of sorts. ‘Ships in the night,’ she says.

Back in his office he glances through the essay. Her handwriting is naive and laborious, with painstakingly looped characters. The letter T is frequently capitalized; in place of a dot, the i always bears a small circle like a little o of surprise.
History should be Telling iT like iT was
, she writes.
This is whaT The German historian Ranke meanT when he said
, Wie es eigentlich gewesen –
we must show It like It was
.
Some people Think This is wrong, but iT seems To me quiTe righT
.

He feels a surge of affection. And fear. Suddenly she no longer appears the assured, confident woman that he has taken her to be: quite unexpectedly she seems like a vulnerable child.

Of course, Telling iT like iT was is also understanding iT like iT was, and This may be very difficult
…

*

Dear Dr Denham

Thank you for your enquiry regarding Major D. Braudel of the 2nd battalion, the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry. I have looked through the regimental diary for the period you mention, and although the diary does not as a rule mention individuals by name, I do find a reference to this officer in the entry for Wednesday 14th May, 1958. I quote it, in its entirety, below:

‘Major Braudel, CO D Coy, murdered, probably by Eoka, while off duty in Limassol.’

If you wish for further details of this officer’s career I suggest you get in touch with the Army Records Office which holds all individual records of service. I must warn you, however, that such information is usually only released to the individual in question or to immediate relatives.

Yours sincerely,

Trotter, J. Lt Col. (retd).

Curator, Museum of Ox & Bucks L.I.

‘W
hat do you want?’ Kale asks. She stands in the middle of his office, biting the inside of her lip. Today she looks about sixteen. Sometimes she looks tough and grown-up, a good thirty or more. Other times she seems little more than an adolescent. She even changes her gait, her way of standing. Today it’s a short, sharp skirt and heavy shoes and her knees turned inwards. Pigeon-toed. She’s wearing one of those shirts that looks crumpled even when it’s not.

‘I just want to return your essay,’ Thomas explains. ‘And to see you alone for a bit.’

‘People’ll get suspicious if you call me in like this. Eric already says I won’t have any problem with my grades, if I play my cards right.’

‘Eric’s a silly prat.’

She takes the essay from him and glances over it. He has scribbled a few comments in the margin, and marked it at the end. ‘What’s that mean? Fifteen out of twenty-five. What’s that?’

‘It means it’s not bad, for a first attempt.’

‘What do you mean, not bad? I can’t do any better than that. I can’t help it if I can’t write. It’s not my fault.’

‘You’ll get better. With practice.’

‘I haven’t got time for practice.’

‘I want to see more of you,’ he says. ‘I want a bit of practice as well.’

She shrugs. ‘It’s not easy, is it? There’s Emma. There’s my work. There’s other stuff.’

What other stuff, he wonders? ‘Who was it you were arguing with the other day? I was looking out of the window and I saw you on the concourse. With a man. Was that him?’

She shrugs. ‘Maybe. Maybe it was.’

‘I thought you’d finished with him.’

‘He wants me back, doesn’t he?’ Her tone suggests that Thomas ought to know, that it’s obvious.

‘And what about you?’

‘I want to be left in peace, don’t I?’

‘By me as well?’

‘Maybe … maybe not.’

He takes her hand. He expects her to snatch it away, but she doesn’t. She lets it lie there, fragile and cool, like a small mammal lying passive in a cage. And then he notices the bruise. It’s on her wrist, a luminous grey-blue mark like a tattoo, a pretty enough thing really, an abstract shape curling cleverly round the narrow bones.