Swimming to Ithaca (26 page)

She wound down the window. ‘Damien!’ she cried. And then, an instinctive sense of propriety taking over: ‘Major Braudel!’

He turned, frowning.

‘Over here!’ she called.

He said something to the sergeant, then hurried across the street. There was that brisk, military manner, the slick transfer of his cane from right arm to left, the snapping of a salute. It seemed comical to be saluted, especially by him. He leaned in at the window. ‘Dee, what the hell are you doing in the middle of all this?’

‘I was at Marjorie’s.’

‘Didn’t you know there was going to be some trouble? Do you need help? Are you OK?’ He noticed the driver and laughed. ‘Can’t the Teddy boy get you home safely?’

Dee felt angry and defensive. ‘He’s been marvellous.’

‘I can look after Mrs D all right,’ Nicos said.

Damien seemed amused. ‘Jolly good fellow. Look, I’m afraid I can’t stay chatting like this. I’ll try and send someone round to see that you’re safely home. OK?’

He smiled, and touched his beret in a mockery of a salute. She noticed the cap badge, a bugle-horn hanging from ribbons, like a toy. ‘Must go,’ he said. And then he had returned to the Land-Rover and was talking to the sergeant again.

Nicos began to manoeuvre the car, screwing round to look out of the back window. The engine roared. He spun the wheel, jerked the car back and forth in the narrow street, and suddenly they were free of the jam and going back the way they had come. ‘This ought to get us out of here,’ he said, turning down a side street. And sure enough they had cleared the traffic and were driving through narrow back streets, and then the empty suburbs, the deserts of waste ground and building sites that formed a shifting hinterland around the core of the city. Nicos caught her eye and grinned. She began to recognize landmarks – the fire station, the police barracks, and then Demetris’ corner shop and the sign saying
16TH OF JUNE STREET
.

The road was deserted. No inhabitant in any garden, no customer in Demetris’ shop, no one sitting in the cars parked against the kerb. In the silent suburban street only lizards moved. The riot, demonstration, whatever it was, seemed to have taken place in another world.

‘Here we are, Mrs D. Home sweet home. Did you think we wouldn’t never make it?’
Fink
, he said.

‘You did very well, Nicos.’ She felt she should make up for Damien’s mockery. ‘Why don’t you come in for a cup of tea or something, after all that excitement?’

‘That’s real decent of you, Mrs D. Real nice.’ He leaped out to hold the door open for her. ‘If I can just make a phone call. Tell ’em where I am.’

‘Of course.’

She led him inside – ‘There’s the phone’ – and went into the kitchen. She could hear him dialling and then talking rapidly in
Greek. Foreign, staccato sounds, surprisingly alien. Not like French or Italian, where you could pick out words even if you couldn’t speak the language. There was something disconcerting about having him here in the house. No longer a youth; an adult, male, taller than her and stronger.

A moment later he appeared at the kitchen door. There was that glance of amusement, that uncertain reflection of Charteris, just as soon vanished as noticed. She put the kettle on. ‘Make yourself at home. Do you want tea or coffee? It’s only Nescafé, I’m afraid.’

‘Nescaff’s fine.’

‘So what’s going to happen now?’ she asked as she bent to get the cups out of the cupboard. She sensed him eyeing her. She felt disturbingly vulnerable, and yet the sensation was not unpleasant. It was like someone stroking the palm of her hand, evoking a shiver of delight.

‘Happen?’

‘In Limassol. Now the Turks have had their riot, what’s EOKA going to do?’

‘Why do you ask me about EOKA, Mrs D?’

She turned. ‘Don’t you know? Doesn’t every Greek Cypriot know what’s going to happen? EOKA’s like an endemic disease, isn’t it? Everyone’s infected.’

He watched her, puzzled. ‘What’s endemic mean?’

‘It’s Greek, so you ought to know. And you’re evading the question.’

‘Well, what do you want me to say?’

‘The truth. About how you feel.’

‘There’s a truth for yourself and a truth for others, isn’t there?’

‘Is there? What’s that supposed to mean? You say one thing to one person and another thing to someone else?’

‘More or less. You smile and say polite things to the British, but inside you want EOKA to win because at least it’s Greek. At
least it’s us, rather than a bunch of snotty-nosed toffs from Eton or wherever.’

‘And that’s what you do with me, say polite things to my face while thinking something else?’ The kettle came to the boil. She spooned the brown dust, poured water, stirred. To her surprise her hands were shaking. Maybe it was the aftershock of the demonstration. Maybe it was this conversation with Nicos, quite unlike any they had had before.

‘Why do you want to know what I think, anyway?’ Nicos asked.

‘Because I like you and I want to understand you. And EOKA. I want to understand EOKA. No one else seems to, none of the people I meet.’ She put the cup of coffee on the table. The question of EOKA lay between them, dangerous and ugly like a weapon – like the Sterling submachine gun that had lain on the front seat of the car taking her and Tom to the airport. ‘You don’t have to say anything if you don’t want to. This isn’t a court of law. But you can’t pretend it doesn’t matter.’

‘What if I did say what I think? Where would it get me?’

‘I’d listen.’

‘Fat lot of good that’d do. You British can never understand.’ He sipped his coffee, blew across the surface to cool it. ‘Sorry,’ he said, and suddenly she was reminded of Charteris again: the same sharp anger, the same wry apology. And a sheepish grin. ‘I shouldn’t have said that. You’re different.’

She laughed. ‘Am I? I hope I am.’ She offered him a cigarette – you couldn’t get Players on the open market any longer, not since the EOKA ban on British goods – and he accepted eagerly, cocking his head on one side as he lit it. It was a practised gesture that smacked of James Dean or Frank Sinatra, one of those Americans he idolized. ‘So tell me. Tell me what you think.’

He drew in the smoke and then let it out in a thin stream, watching her all the time. ‘OK. I believe in an idea, see? The idea’s called democracy and it means rule by the people and it was invented by the Greeks two and a half thousand years ago. And ever since then the Greek people of Cyprus have been denied it – by the Romans, by the Turks and now by the British. Now I believe it’s time for us to take it back, and unite with our brothers and sisters in Greece itself. OK? When I was in Enfield I used to get into trouble – you know, picking fights, that kind of stuff. About nothing. Just for the sake of it. Bloody silly when you think about it. But here …’ he hesitated, smiled nervously, ‘… well here I reckon there’s something worth getting into a fight over.’

‘Against us?’

‘It’s not against the British. We love the British, don’t you see that?’ His tone was urgent, willing her to believe him. ‘The British fought with us when the Germans came. They were on our side. And they did the same when we were fighting for freedom from the Turks. The British are our friends. Here in Cyprus, we’re not fighting against the British. Believe me, Mrs D. What we are fighting is the people who are occupying our land.’ He looked embarrassed, as though aware he had transgressed some invisible barrier. ‘I’m sorry. I should’ve shut up.’

‘I asked you.’

‘Yeah, but it’s dangerous to say what you feel. Especially knowing what I know.’

‘What do you know?’

He laughed – a sharp, ironic sound. ‘I know things they’d kill me for, if they knew I was talking to you like this.’

‘Don’t be silly, Nicos.’

‘I’m not being silly, either.’

‘So what do you know that’s so dangerous?’

He looked up at her standing there at the sink. ‘I know that I’m in love with you,’ he said.

She blushed. ‘Don’t be silly.’

‘You asked me and I’ve said it.’

She turned away and looked out of the window on to the dusty garden. This foreign world, of sudden violence, of sun and heat and passion, disturbed her. It wasn’t fear she felt. She had mistaken it for fear at first, but now she knew it was something different – a sense of elation, a feeling of being alive more acutely because of the very closeness of death.

The palm tree rattled in the breeze. A lizard darted along the windowsill. Behind her she heard the scrape of his chair being pushed back. She knew, of course. Without turning she could interpret the sounds and the things that were more than sound – a movement, a perception of presence, the faint exhalation of breath just behind her. When she turned he was there, standing over her, mere inches away.

She tried to read his face: the eyes with their wide pupils, the tightening of his jaw, the sudden, lizard dart of his tongue. His Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed. Men had prominent Adam’s apples, women did not, as a rule. Why was that? Something to do with glands, the thyroid maybe. Or the parathyroid. How did she know things like that? How could she think of them at a moment like this?

‘Nicos, what are you doing?’ He was close enough for the warmth of his body to be perceptible, and she put up her hand and placed it against his chest. His heart was beating rapidly, like an animal trapped there beneath her palm. He closed his hand over hers and kept it there. This, she guessed, was what he did with the girls in the dance halls, the shallow girls with beehive hairstyles and over-made-up faces. ‘Please, Nicos,’ she whispered. ‘Don’t do anything silly.’

He laughed faintly, that dry, sarcastic sound. ‘You like me, don’t you?’

‘Of course I like you …’

‘There you are, then.’ He leaned forward. She held herself very still. One of his hands was in the small of her back, pulling her against him, and she was conscious of the thinness of her dress, the only thing between her and him, a mere scrap of cotton. His eyes watched hers carefully, as though he was looking for something there.

‘Nicos,’ she said.

‘What is it, Mrs D?’

‘We shouldn’t be doing this.’

A breath of amusement. He wasn’t stupid. He’d noticed.
We
. ‘D’you want us to stop?’ he asked.

‘Please.’ The word was equivocal, everything was equivocal. He moved forward and she could feel his breath, not bad but strange: the cigarette he had smoked and the coffee he had drunk, and something else that was him alone. Then he touched his lips on hers. Just fractionally she opened her mouth. His tongue slipped inside, like a thief in the night, moving here and there as though looking to see what there was to steal. She pulled away, turned her head aside, swallowing the saliva that was there. His and hers, presumably.

‘Oh, God,’ she whispered. ‘Please don’t.’ She felt a terrifying shortage of breath, as though his mere presence might suffocate her.

Slowly he relaxed his grip. ‘There, you see,’ he said, as though by letting her go he was demonstrating something – trustworthiness perhaps, honour, decency, all those qualities that people pay lip service to.

She extricated herself from his grasp and went over to her handbag. ‘What do I see? What am I meant to see, Nicos?’ She took out a cigarette and lit it with trembling hands.

‘You see that I’d never hurt you. That I’d never do anything you don’t want me to.’

She tried a laugh. ‘I’m not sure I wanted you to kiss me.’

‘You didn’t stop me, though.’

She drew on her cigarette, felt the smoke calm her. ‘Perhaps you’d better go. Cool down a bit.’

‘I thought you liked me,’ he said.

‘I do. Of course I do.’

‘I mean,
really
liked me. You know what I mean. You look at me sometimes … and I think, you know …’

‘What do you think?’

‘That if it wasn’t like it is, it’d be different.’

‘Well that’s obvious. A tautology.’

He shook his head. ‘I haven’t got a chance with someone like you, have I? Me talking like I do and not knowing half of what you know an’ all. It’s me that’s wrong, isn’t it? Too young, although it’s only a few years, and I can’t talk posh like you, and I’m a Cyp. I mean, if I were like that officer bloke it’d be all right.’

‘What on earth are you talking about?’

‘You know what I mean. The one that was there today. The one you met in the bar.’

She didn’t know what to say really. There was something comic and strangely moving about him, both at the same time. ‘Major Braudel is just a friend.’

The boy grinned. ‘That’s what they all say. Just good friends, like Princess Margaret and that group-captain fellow. I’m not stupid, you know. But don’t worry. I’m not going to tell on you. Your secret’s safe with me—’

‘There is no secret.’

‘—just as my secret is safe with you. We’re obligated to one another, aren’t we?’

‘What do you mean, obligated?’ She wasn’t even sure whether
the word existed. Obliged? The thought almost made her smile, almost brought laughter, which would have been dreadful. He would have thought she was laughing at him.

‘We both got secrets, haven’t we? What I said is true. They’d kill me if they knew I was with you like this. Dangerous, see? Knowledge.’ His expression was difficult to interpret. There was a look of imprecation about it, as though he were risking everything in this one throw.

‘
Kill
you? Who’d kill you?’

He nodded. ‘I told you: I know things.’

She drew on her cigarette, cast around for some way out. ‘Look, really it’d be better if you went. And forget that this business ever happened.’

He seemed to take breath, as though summoning up his courage. ‘I know where Dighenis is hiding.’

At that moment the doorbell rang. The sound rattled through the house, shrill and frenetic. There was sudden panic in the boy’s face. Dee looked round, startled. ‘I’d better get it.’ She stubbed out her cigarette and hurried to the front door. Her hands were still shaking as she struggled with the handle. The door opened on to the bright light of the veranda, and there was Damien. His Land-Rover was parked on the far side of the road with the sergeant watching from the driver’s seat.