Swimming to Ithaca (35 page)

What was it Voltaire said? History is a bag of tricks played on the dead by the living. Something like that.

Nothing happened, that was the strange thing. Life went on. The sun shone, with that alien insistence that it had out there in the eastern Mediterranean, and nothing had changed. Binty organized a picnic at Aphrodite’s Rock, with Geoffrey and the Frindles and another couple who had only recently come out from England. The newcomers were as white as larvae in their swimming things, as though they had lived in the dark for years. Moonburn, Geoffrey called it. He stood with the great rock as a backdrop and, despite Binty’s objections, gave them his spiel: ‘It was here,’ he told them: ‘the most momentous event in the history of mankind – Aphrodite arrives in the world. How does she do it? Well, it’s not your usual epiphany, I can tell you that. Uranus, if you’ll forgive the expression, was her father, see? His son, Cronos, cuts off Daddy’s private parts and tosses them into the sea, and out of the foam – his semen, really, and not the kind you find in ships – comes the goddess of love herself.’

Binty was shocked. ‘I really think you could moderate your language in front of the children, Geoffrey.’

He considered her protest with mock seriousness. ‘Which bit don’t you like, old thing? Uranus?’

The children went swimming. They dived and swam and splashed one another, while Dee sat detached from the group, gazing out to sea and smoking. The water was still, as calm as a jelly. No foam today, no sperm. Geoffrey came and sat beside her. ‘When does Edward get back?’ he asked. ‘Haven’t seen him for ages.’

‘Tomorrow. Binty and Douglas are taking us to the airfield.’

‘How are things with you? Been managing on your own? You look rather unhappy.’

‘I’m all right,’ she assured him. ‘Just fine.’

He watched her carefully. ‘Tell me something.’

One of the boys was swimming far out, way out of his depth. He was older than Neil and Tom, more self-assured. She watched him, the strong confidence of his strokes. ‘Tell you about what?’

‘About your taxi driver.’

She drew on her cigarette and held the smoke in her lungs for a few moments, then expelled it in a careful stream. Her hand, the hand that took the cigarette from her mouth, was unsteady. ‘There’s nothing to tell, Geoffrey.’

‘It’s just that he’s gone.’

She looked round at him sitting in his deckchair. ‘Gone?’

‘It’s all right, you don’t need to raise your voice. He’s vanished, my dear. No longer found in his usual haunts. I thought you might know something.’

‘Nothing at all.’

He sipped his beer, staring out to sea as though the goddess herself might suddenly rise up out of the water. ‘You saw him the day before he did a bunk, didn’t you? He drove you down to the SSAFA canteen.’

She felt a small pulse of fear. ‘Perhaps he did. He used to drive me down there most days. Tuesdays and Thursdays, at any rate. Him or his uncle. I don’t remember.’

‘Oh, you remember all right, Mrs Denham. He turned up in the morning and you invited him in.’ Geoffrey was smiling, watching her through the haze of his cigarette smoke, and smiling. ‘You spent a couple of hours together, didn’t you? What were you doing all that time, I wonder? Discussing the weather?’

‘Were you spying on me?’ Her voice rose in pitch. She hoped it sounded angry. ‘Are your nasty little men watching me? He was trying to teach me Greek, Geoffrey.
O kairos einai kalós
. The accent’s not very good, but you get the meaning, I’m sure. He’s a friend. Maybe the idea is strange to you. That nonsense you talked about his being a member of EOKA or whatever – he’s what I said, just a young man a bit out of place here, and eager to have a chat with someone from England. He’s more English than Greek and the soldiers he meets are suspicious of him, of course they are, and so he’s befriended me. What’s politics got to do with it?’

‘But his Greek friends are murderers. Maybe he’s one himself.’

She gave a cry of some kind – disbelief, protest, horror, it wasn’t clear. ‘How can you say such a thing?’

‘It’s not difficult, you know, not when you move in that sort of world. The creed justifies the means, doesn’t it? It always seems easy to kill in the name of a belief.’ He sipped his beer, glanced across at her. ‘I think you warned him off, didn’t you? Is that it? Did you betray our little covenant of salt?’

She got up from the deckchair. Where was Tom? Paula was splashing around in the shallows, but where was Tom? ‘There was no understanding, Geoffrey,’ she said flatly. ‘None at all.’

*

There’s another boy, a newcomer called Stephen. He’s older. Fourteen, perhaps fifteen. A strong swimmer. He goes out, way out of his depth, swimming freestyle. And Tom follows. There is a moment when he detaches from land. It’s almost a boundary crossed, some invisible but real borderline on the languid surface of the sea. Up to that point you are swimming with the others, turning and calling and waving to them to show them how it’s done; and then you’ve crossed the border and suddenly you are at sea, and they are mere figures on the shore, barely distinguishable for sex or age, their sound coming to you from far away and long ago.

Never has he been out so far. Never has he been out of his depth like this. He pauses, treading water and looking down through translucent layers to the seabed far beneath. He’s flying. It’s like one of those flying dreams he has, where you can just step up into the air and all is easy and all is possible. Fish pass below him, cautious about the shadow overhead. Stephen is still further out. Tom is all alone here, in the midst of the ocean, Aphrodite’s ocean, where the goddess drifted towards the shore and began to play havoc in the lives of men and women.

‘Tom!’

The sound doesn’t intrude. It’s from another world.

‘Tom!’

Someone is swimming out towards him from the shore – a mere head floating on the surface, hair plastered. His mother. ‘Tom!’ she cries and then sinks back into the flurry of disturbance that she has made for herself. ‘Tom!’ She hasn’t crossed the border yet into this distant world of the ocean where Tom floats. She is shouting and trying to raise herself out of the water, attempting to rise above the surface, waving her hand and calling – ‘Tom!’ – and falling back and swimming on. He hangs, suspended. Time seems suspended. He can see his own shadow, far below him on the seabed.

‘Tom, come in,’ she cries, and suddenly she is there close to him,
swimming up to him, her limbs flexing beneath the surface. ‘For God’s sake, you’re right out of your depth.’

‘Look,’ he says to her, pointing downwards at their shadows moving together on the seabed far below. ‘It’s like flying.’

She looks; and panics. ‘Oh, God!’ Her cry is almost a prayer. ‘Oh God, no!’ Panic comes from somewhere else, from the darkness and the shadows deep inside her; it wells up out of the depths, floods through the fragile constructs of sanity and self-composure, sweeping everything before it. Her arms thrash around. The placid skin of water is ruptured and torn, ripped apart as though with a knife. Her legs writhe. There is a moment when she seems about to go under, and he watches her, wondering whether this will be the moment when she dies. Absurd, that: he wonders whether she is going to drown there before him, and all the time she can fly just like him.

It takes talk and calm to get her back to shore. Binty sees her flailing arms, hears her cries and swims out. They talk to her, calm her, persuade her to lie still, not to look down, to remember that she can swim as easily as they. Slowly the seabed rises towards them, the gap between their floating bodies and the black frogs of their shadows diminishing, until they can put down a foot and touch. She wades out of the water and sits, shaking as though with cold, on a towel. He looks down at the two women, Binty with her comforting arms around his mother, his mother shivering.

‘Don’t ever do that again,’ Binty snaps at Tom, as though he just might, as though he might deliberately swim out there in order to drown his mother. That is the idiocy of adults, he thinks.

‘It’s all right,’ his mother says. ‘I’m quite all right.’

But she’s not, is she? She’s shaking, and she’s in tears. He has never seen her in tears before, not really in tears. He stands there looking down on them, then wanders away to entertain himself.

L
ike a family welcoming their hero back from war they stood in a group on the perimeter track and watched as the Comet approached. The aircraft bucked and twisted in the hot spring air as it came in over the coastal flats, touching down with a puff of blue smoke from its tyres and a small sigh of relief from the watchers. It roared down the runway past them, then slowed and turned in the distance.

‘Is Daddy inside?’ Paula asked. ‘Is he waving to us?’

‘Of course he is.’

The aircraft was coming back at them now, like a threatening wading-bird, its legs reflected in shining pools of mirage. It turned broadside to them and the engines died. Vague shapes swam behind the Perspex bowls of the windows. ‘I can’t see him,’ she cried, ‘I can’t see him!’

They watched while the stairs were manoeuvred into place and the passengers filed down to the concrete, their faces screwed against the heat and the light, their clothes crumpled. He appeared with the crew, after everyone had disembarked. Paula jumped up at him and shouted ‘Daddy, Daddy!’ while Dee kissed him and Tom stood aside and watched. Edward reached out and tousled his son’s hair and called him ‘old boy’. They walked across the apron towards the car, and all seemed normal. ‘How did your mother take it?’ Dee asked. She felt that she was searching for the right things to say, the correct phrases, the usual platitudes.

‘You know how she is. Tough. There’s a sort of fatalism about her.’

‘I hope you sent her my love.’

‘Of course I did. So how have you all been without me?’

She shrugged and looked away. ‘Fine. We’ve been fine.’

‘What have you been up to?’

They climbed into the car, the children pushing and shoving in the back seat. ‘Up to?’

‘What have you been doing with yourselves?’

She looked away out of the window across the airfield. ‘This and that. Nothing much.’ Out there in the middle of the dry grass there was a hut painted with red and white stripes. On its roof a radar scanner went round and round, seeking things out, sensing messages that were invisible and inaudible but there nevertheless, projected intangibly through the warm spring air.

‘Are you all right, Dee?’

She looked round, and almost didn’t recognize him sitting there, his hand on the ignition key, his foot just ready to touch the accelerator as the engine came to life. ‘Of course I’m all right. Why shouldn’t I be?’

‘You don’t look well.’

Perhaps it was his question, his faint air of concern, that breached her defences, for quite unexpectedly she was weeping, sitting there in the car beside Edward with the children shocked to silence in the back seat, and weeping uncontrollably, convulsively, like someone struggling for air, like someone drowning. He reached out and put his arm round her and patted her on the back. ‘It’s all right, darling,’ he said. ‘It’s all right. I know it’s all been a bit of a strain, but now it’s all right.’

And then, as the convulsions abated, she told him: the swimming, the going out of her depth – ‘It wasn’t Tom’s fault, don’t blame Tom’ – that awful space beneath her and the panic welling up inside. ‘I thought I was going to drown. I thought I was going to drown. I still feel that I’m going to drown.’

‘Still feel it? But you’re safe. I’m back and you’re safe.’ He held her awkwardly, as though he had just rescued her and didn’t quite know what to do next. ‘You’re on dry land. You’re here and now and I’m back with you.’ He patted her shoulder and carefully eased her upright in her seat, and turned the key in the ignition. The engine started. ‘Let’s all go home and you can
have a rest, and the children will be especially quiet and good. All right?’

She swam, out of her depth, throughout the night, and woke in the early morning when it was still dark. Edward was beside her in the bed, turned on his side and facing away, breathing deeply. She lay there sweating beneath the sheet and clinging to her secret memory like a drowning woman clinging to a lifebelt. Her hand moved between her legs, evoking a thin, impoverished flood of sensation that washed over her and, in the first light of dawn, cast her up on dry land. When Edward awoke she had already been up two hours. ‘I couldn’t sleep,’ she said as he appeared at the kitchen door. ‘I haven’t been sleeping well. Not in the last few days.’

He came over and embraced her. His hands on her hips were somehow repellent. ‘Please,’ she whispered against his neck. ‘Not now.’

Later that morning – Edward had gone to work, Voula was hoovering in the sitting room – the phone rang. But when she hurried into the hall to answer it there was no one on the other end, just a thin rush of sound like a chill wind blowing through the wires. ‘Hello? Hello?’

The receiver whispered its hollow, electronic silence back at her.

‘Hello?’ she said. ‘Who’s there?’ Then softer, dangerously, she asked, ‘Is that you? Where are you?’

When she phoned Phaedon Taxis it was Stavros who replied. Nicos had gone, he told her. If she wanted a taxi, he would drive. Where had he gone? The line was silent for a moment. ‘He’s a grown man,’ he said. ‘He do what he like.’ And the phone went down.

She’s standing in the garden, by the hibiscus bush. ‘Tom,’ she says. He looks up from what he’s doing, which is pursuing a scorpion into
a crevice among the stones. Paula’s somewhere else, doing whatever stupid thing keeps her amused, digging.

‘Yes?’

‘What are you doing?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Binty’s coming to take you for a swim.’

‘I’m busy.’

‘You said you were doing nothing. Anyway, I thought you liked going with Neil.’ For a moment she stands watching him. ‘Tom,’ she says.