Swimming to Ithaca (31 page)

‘I’ve got to see you alone,’ he said. ‘I can’t bear this.’

She could hear the loud expostulations of Douglas sounding through the closed door from the dining room – ‘These people don’t know what’s good for them,’ he was saying.

‘But we’ve got to do something.’

‘We can’t do anything.’

Out in the hall the telephone rang. The dining-room door opened and Edward came out. She felt Damien move away as Edward picked up the phone. The passage of time, seemingly halted for an instant, moved on.

Tom is lying in bed, asleep.

He’s not asleep, but he’s meant to be asleep.

He’s lying in bed, and when his mother comes in to check, he’s asleep, and when she doesn’t, he’s awake. Is this behaviour forbidden? Sort of. ‘Go to sleep’ is an injunction with a degree of compulsion behind it, as though you can induce sleep merely by willing it. But sleep just happens. You wait, and it happens. Or not. In the dormitory at school he lies awake for as long as he can because in the dormitory, after lights-out, he is free
…

There are guests to dinner, and he’s listening to the laughter, to the murmur of conversation, to the rise and fall of words. Some
phrases he can hear, some voices he can recognize. Douglas’, of course. Binty’s laughter. Others he doesn’t know.

Paula is next door, and she’s asleep. But then she’s younger and oblivious to the delights of eavesdropping. Sometimes when there are guests he creeps out of bed and goes to the dining-room door to listen. He’s a spy. Spies do these things. Spies watch and listen and note things down. Spies construct stories from the small hints that people drop.

He’s lying in bed awake. He can hear someone going to the kitchen. He recognizes his mother’s footsteps. Other steps follow. Then the telephone rings and there’s a burst of volume, and then the dining-room door closes and all he can hear is the rise and fall of his father’s voice on the telephone. The words are blurred by the intervening wall but you can sense things from the tone. Insistence. Shock. The undulations of concern and distress. Something has happened.

Sleep. He’s lying in bed asleep. Then he’s awake, and his father is talking on the telephone again, this time with a certain authority, as though he knows what he is doing. Talking to someone of a lesser rank. His words cut through the wall, cut through the door, cut through Tom’s sleep: ‘I want to get on the flight tomorrow. Supplementary crew. Yes, that’s right. My father has just died and I’ve got to get back to the UK.’

Tom is lying in bed, asleep.

Next morning his father has gone. ‘Grandpapa’s ill,’ his mother tells the two of them over breakfast. ‘Daddy’s had to go and help Grandmamma.’

‘Help her do what?’ Paula asks.

‘Help her look after Grandpapa, of course.’

He has never caught his mother out in a lie before. But perhaps she’s not telling a lie. Perhaps Grandpapa
is
ill. Perhaps he’s alive and dead at the same time. Perhaps two contradictory truths can coexist.

‘How would you like to go to Binty’s tomorrow? There are things I’ve got to do.’ She smiles brightly, as though to encourage them, as
though this might help Grandpapa on the road to recovery or resurrection.

‘I don’t want to go to Binty’s,’ Paula says. ‘I want to be with you.’

‘You’ll be with Tom. Tom doesn’t mind going to Binty’s, does he?’

He doesn’t. Tom is hardened to dislocation.

The day vanishes from memory. Days can have that evanescent quality, like the colours in spring: there so vividly, just as soon bleached out by the summer sun. The next morning he wakes early and goes to his parents’ room where his mother is still in bed, half asleep. He climbs in beside her, into the warmth and the smell of familiarity and family, a smell that other homes and, presumably, other beds do not possess; a unique, territorial smell. He cuddles against her and feels the soft masses of her breasts through the cotton of her nightdress.

‘How is Grandpapa?’ he asks.

She considers the question and her answer for a few moments. ‘I’m afraid Grandpapa’s dead, darling,’ she tells him.

After careful thought he admits that he already knows.

‘You know?’

‘I heard Daddy talking on the phone.’

‘You’ve known all the time?’

‘Yes.’

She holds him close. ‘Don’t tell Paula yet, will you? It would upset her too much.’

He hasn’t the heart to tell her that Paula won’t care. Death is something that adults feel, not children. That is the thought that has been worrying him. Why can’t he feel any emotion over his grandfather’s death? That jovial, amiable man whom he knew well and loved. Why doesn’t he cry, as he suspects his mother has been doing? Why is he merely curious about what has happened? Not upset; curious. What’s it like, being dead? What’s it like being absent from everything and everyone? What do you become? You become your remembrance.

B
inty looked at her quizzically. ‘Are you all right, darling?’ Dee smiled. ‘I’m fine.’ Walking on the edge of a precipice, she thought, thinking of flying.

‘Are you sure you don’t want to come with us? Have a talk, get things off your chest?’

‘I’d love to, but I can’t really desert Marjorie. She’s all on her own and what with the disturbances there are lots of customers these days. I’m sorry to dump you with the children.’

‘Oh, they’ll be all right. We’ll go for a swim first and then I’ll take them home. They’ll entertain each other. I’ll bring them back at about six, if that’s OK? How’s Edward getting on? Has he phoned?’

‘Yesterday. It’s not that easy getting through. I expect I’ll hear from him this evening. He seemed OK.’

She kissed the children and waved as they drove away, then went back inside to change. She put on the full-skirted frock, the one with blue and white stripes. It suited her. Edward always said so. And then she could only wait, washing the breakfast things – she had given Voula the day off – pottering around the house, tidying some of the children’s toys away. She felt a variety of emotions – anticipation, anxiety, a strange abstraction from reality, as though she were in a dream state of some kind, as though all the mundane things around her were abnormal, and the only reality was within her mind. She opened the french windows and went out into the garden. The air was laden with the perfumes of spring, the scent of jasmine almost overpowering in its intensity. She wandered along the dry paths. There was no grass. It wasn’t like England. Nothing was like England. Here, growing out of dry earth, were hibiscus and pomegranate and oleander, plants that she had never seen, barely even imagined, until she came out here. Oranges, of course, and myrtle and bougainvillaea. It was only two days ago that Tom had found another chameleon in one of the trees; or
maybe the same one. How on earth could one tell? The animal had watched them impassively through the barrels of its armoured eyes, grasping its branch with slow thumbs and, when Tom picked it up – Paula had screamed – and moved it to another place, delicately changing its colour to suit its background. Dee had felt a curious affinity with the animal. One colour in Sheffield, another here; one for Edward, one for Damien, another for Tom and Paula, another for Nicos.

On one of the paths she discovered Paula’s tricycle. The children were always leaving their stuff outside. Lying beneath a hibiscus bush was a football that Tom had been given for his last birthday. She warned them that anyone could climb into the garden and take things, some child from the gypsy camp perhaps. It would be their own fault if their toys disappeared.

She was about to take the things in when she heard the car. The sound was distinctive, like a familiar voice. Trying not to hurry, she picked up the tricycle and strolled round to the front. The car was parked outside the gate, and there he was, climbing out. He smiled awkwardly, anxiety in his eyes. ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘You look great. That dress.’

She wondered how often she had worn it before that he might have seen. Her wardrobe wasn’t extensive. ‘It’s an old one.’

‘It’s lovely.’ He looked round, standing just outside the gate as though waiting to be asked in. ‘What about the kids?’

She showed him the trike. ‘Tidying up after them. They’ve gone swimming with Mrs Paxton. And Voula’s got the day off.’ Why did she tell him that? To make things clear? They stood looking at one another for a moment. ‘Do you want to come in for a moment? A cup of coffee or something?’

He opened the gate. ‘If that’s all right. I don’t want …’ But he never said what he didn’t want. From behind his back he produced a flower, a single cyclamen of intense magenta, and
held it out to her. He blushed slightly. ‘Found it on the roadside, underneath some trees. Not exactly a bouquet of red roses, but it’s something.’

She accepted the flower with elaborate solemnity, as though this were a tradition in a strange country where she had never been before. That was how she felt: a traveller in a land whose customs she could only guess at. ‘It’s beautiful.’

He followed her up the steps to the front door. Inside was a kind of sanctuary, away from strangers’ eyes. She put the trike down and closed the door. ‘Come through. Make yourself comfortable. What would you like? Coffee? Shall I make a cup of coffee? Before we go?’

He followed her into the sitting room. There was a photograph of the children on a side table, Tom in his school uniform, Paula wearing a pretty frock with smocking across the front. She watched him pick it up. ‘Lovely kids,’ he said. ‘She’s a right terror, isn’t she?’

Dee laughed. ‘I’ll just put this in some water. Otherwise it’ll die.’

‘It’ll die anyway.’

‘Maybe I’ll press it. I used to press flowers when I was at school. Between sheets of blotting paper. You know?’

He didn’t.

‘They last for ever,’ she told him. ‘Almost.’

The beach is called Lady’s Mile because a British officer used to exercise his horse, a mare called Lady, here. When? Some time ago, before the war. Tom has found this out by asking people. He finds things out, like a detective, or a spy. So it’s Lady’s Mile, not Ladies’ Mile, not lots of women sunbathing. Those were the days when you could name a part of the world after your pet horse, if you were an Englishman. The beach is a long stretch of grey sand in the western arm of Limassol Bay. To the left lies the city, the line of buildings
along the seafront, the warehouses and the water towers; beyond it the coast curves round towards the east and fades into the haze of distance. There are ships anchored out in the roads, unloading into lighters. Behind the beach is the Salt Lake with its birds, the sly pink flush of flamingos.

‘Tom forgot his football,’ says Neil.

‘Too late now.’ They’re unpacking their things from the back of the car. Alexandra is inside a large towel, changing into her swimming costume. Tom watches her.

‘We wanted to play,’ Neil says.

‘We’re here to swim. I thought that’s what you wanted, a swim.’

‘But after. We want to play when we get home.’

‘There are other things to do.’

‘We wanted to play football.’

Alexandra completes her changing without letting anything slip. She looks back at Tom as though claiming some kind of victory. Her body is just acquiring the shapes of womanhood, a narrowing of the waist, tiny breast buds beneath her costume. Does she have hair between her legs? he wonders. She turns and runs across the sand towards the edge of the water. ‘It’s freezing!’ she cries from the shallows.

‘Don’t be silly. It’ll be fine once you’re in.’

‘Can we go back for it?’

‘Back for what?’

‘Tom’s football.’

‘Oh, for goodness’ sake.’

‘Please!’

‘It’s all right,’ Tom says. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘But we want to play football.’

In the kitchen he stood beside her, watching. She could hear the gentle whisper of his breathing, his head close to hers as he bent to see. She had opened a book – that account by Durrell of life
on the island – and laid a sheet of tissue paper on the right-hand page. Carefully she positioned the flower on the bed of tissue and laid a second sheet over it, like a winding-sheet on a corpse. You could see the faint shadow of the flower beneath, the sinuous stalk, the curved magenta petals. Then she closed the book shut and pressed down on it with all her weight. ‘As simple as that,’ she said. ‘You need to keep it pressed for a while. A week or two. At home I’ve got a special press, but this’ll work just as well.’

When she turned she found him in the way. He put out a hand to stop her but she laughed and slipped past, taking the book through into the bedroom. The shutters were closed and the room was deep in shadow. She put the book on a side table and looked around for something heavy to place on top – a glass bowl containing pebbles that Paula had collected on the beach. When she turned round he was there at the doorway, silhouetted against the daylight from the sitting room.

‘I’ve been thinking about what you said.’

‘And what have you decided?’

‘It depends on you.’

He came forward until they were facing each other in the middle of the room, awkwardly, like casual acquaintances suddenly thrown together in an unexpected closeness. That’s what they were, really, strangers meeting in a foreign country and uncertain of the norms of behaviour. She reached up and touched his face, just faintly with the tips of her fingers, along the line of his jaw. ‘What’s it got to do with me?’

‘It’s got lots to do with you. With what you want.’

‘I don’t know what I want.’

He took hold of her hand. She watched as he turned it over and lowered his head to touch his tongue, soft and moist, against her open palm. The dampness glistened like a snail’s trail across the lines of life and head and heart. ‘I’m in a bit of a
muddle, really. Liquorice Allsorts, Aunt Vera says. All of a muddle.’