Swimming to Ithaca (6 page)

‘Tom, what on
earth
are you doing?’

A flash of heat in his face. He shoves the things back in the drawer, his hands shaking. ‘Just looking, Mummy.’

She crosses the room, glances at him curiously, closes the drawer. ‘Well, you mustn’t look without asking,’ she says, and crouches beside him to take him in her arms; and her smell is there, infusing his brain, muddled up with the whole of him. Her breasts large
and soft. He wants to see them. He wants, for a shameful, suppressed moment, to suck at them.

He opens other drawers and inside the last, lifting aside some woollens, he discovers a manila envelope. The word
Oddments
is scrawled across the flap in her handwriting – he remembers the characteristic flourishes, the slant and attack, the style that once brought breathless excitement whenever he received a letter from her. Her handwriting is as redolent of its creator as her features and her voice, and her smell.

Oddments
.

Thomas takes the folder through into the study. He can’t deny a certain quickening of the pulse, a certain tremor in the bowels as he sits at her desk and slides the contents out on to the polished wood. There are a couple of newspaper cuttings, a photo, a crumpled, faded bill from a restaurant, a typewritten menu and, in a folded sheet of plain paper, a pressed flower – a cyclamen. He unfolds the newspaper cuttings. The first one includes a poem, one of Geoffrey Crozier’s, entitled ‘Swimming to Ithaca’. And there’s a sheet of plain paper, brown with age, with another poem on it, typewritten and dedicated.
For Dee
,
with affection
,
Geoffrey
. This one’s called ‘Persephone’. Something about Lethe, the river of forgetfulness that guards the entrance to the underworld. He puts both poems aside. The second cutting is altogether more interesting to the historian. It has the name of the newspaper – the
Times of Cyprus
– pencilled across the top in her handwriting, along with the date:
15th May 1958
. At the head of the story is a portrait photograph of a man wearing a uniform cap. His features are smoothed by the morbid hand of a photographic studio and his smile is hopeful, the kind of smile you wear when you are putting a brave face on things before going off to war. The story below reads:

BRITISH OFFICER SHOT

A British military spokesman reported yesterday that Major Damien Braudel, of the Second Battalion of the Ox and Bucks Light Infantry, died in Limassol on Wednesday of gunshot wounds. The precise nature of the incident is not yet clear, but Army sources said that the probability is that it was an E.O.K.A. action. Major Braudel had been on Cyprus for one year with his regiment, during which he had been involved in operations against E.O.K.A. bands in the Troödos Mountains. He leaves behind his wife and two children. Next of kin have been informed.

A vague recollection stirs, like the elusive image of a dream that remains with you after waking. Damien. And Braudel, a name that memory suddenly and surprisingly gives him as Brawdle. Even that is evidence of a kind, the fact that the misspelled name has lain in his mind all those years, to be lifted out of memory and compared with the actual spelling in print before him. He tries not to pursue the recollection lest it fade away entirely. Instead he turns to the photograph that lies tantalizingly face-down on the desk, with that crisp concavity that is caused by shrinkage of the emulsion. Two inches by three, with deckle edging. Written on the blank back – again, her handwriting – is the name
Nick
.

It’s like playing pelmanism, that childhood game where all the cards of a pack are placed face-down and you have to pick them up in pairs, recalling where the failures were so that others may be matched. He turns the photograph over and reveals a black and white snap of a car. It isn’t a car that he recognizes – it’s some kind of 1950s model, possibly American, with a wide band down the whole length of the body just below the windows.

Yellow stripe for taxis, white stripe for hire cars. Why does
he remember that? What random bits of circuitry bring that kind of fact floating out of the depths? And which was this – yellow or white? The stripe appears darker than the ground beneath the wheels or the blinding white wall behind. A taxi, then, in bright sunlight. With the driver standing by the door – a young man in white shirt and dark trousers and dusty shoes with pointed toes. His black hair is swept back in a cowlick, his eyes and mouth are smiling. And Thomas’ mother is standing beside him, her face composed, her hands clasped in front of her, her eyes hidden by dark sunglasses with thick plastic frames. She is wearing that full cotton frock, decorated with fruit – oranges and lemons. Her waist is narrow, clinched by a wide belt. But there is nothing else, no other hint from the past, no faint footprint to mark the passage of something or someone. Just the photograph of a young man – in his twenties? – and Thomas’ mother – in her thirties – and a taxi parked outside a garage. And the only significance that it carries is that it is here, preserved for over forty years in an envelope marked
Oddments
. Mere survival is evidence.

He picks up the menu card. This is easy. The lettering across the top announces
HMT EMPIRE BUDE
, and the date is typed below: 17th May 1957. The meal is of passing interest, an elaborate confection of Frenchified names that come down to brown soup, meat and two veg, apple pie, cheese and coffee. But in a ragged frame around the typed words there are nine signatures, scrawled in a variety of pens and at a variety of angles. One he makes out immediately because it is his mother’s. Another, written in a looped, convent-school script, is naively readable:
Araminta Paxton
. Araminta, he knows, is Binty. And there is Douglas’ beside it. Douglas and Binty.

The other signatures mean little. Something that may be
Jennifer
, another that may be
Roger
.
Nissey
? Does such a surname exist? Another name begins with M and O. And there’s a DB.

Turning the menu over, he smiles to find that there is more writing on the back:
To the Hidden Dreamer, from one who’s rude and able, DB
. The same rabbit-eared B in the same handwriting as the signature. There is a quickening, the foetus of an idea stirring in the womb of his mind. He counts the possible letters in this signature and comes to something between eleven and fourteen. That will do. It is within the limits of historical probability, that malleable border that historians instinctively draw around their little islands of fact.

He grabs a piece of scrap paper and finds a ballpoint pen in one of the cubby-holes in the desk.

‘Let’s play anagrams,’ she used to say. ‘Try “Thomas Denham”.’

Me sad hot man.

‘Do you know what I am? I’m the Hidden Dreamer.’

The sad hot man considers the phrase on the back of the menu: ‘one who’s rude and able’. He finds it quickly enough,
rude able
transforming into
Braudel
beneath his pen, leaving only a superfluous E. A small tug of excitement. He scribbles down the remaining letters in a rough circle –
ONE WHOS AND E
– but he can’t make anything out of them. It’s like the final clue of the crossword, the one that won’t work out whatever you do with it, however you bend the meanings and the words.

But if
ONE
signifies “I”? I WHOS AND E.

Which gives him the letters for ‘Damien’, all except a missing M. And leaves him with
SHOW
. Is there some hidden message in that? Show what?

I’m.

Where do answers come from? How does the brain work, the hidden circuitry of memory and reason and association? I’m rude and able, that’s what the original anagram had been. He writes it out and it works exactly:
Damien Braudel
–
I’m rude and able
.

Thomas laughs. He can almost see them, in the wood-panelled main dining room of the
Empire Bude
, at the captain’s table perhaps, passing their menus round for signing – the last dinner of the voyage? – the women in cotton frocks with wide skirts and starched petticoats, the officers resplendent in mess kit, like peacocks. The band would be playing, and the major would be turning to Deirdre to say: ‘You may be a hidden dreamer, but I’m afraid I’m rude and able,’ and everyone would be laughing.

Or.

Or maybe it was just a secret between the two of them, the hidden dreamer and her rude and able swain.

He rings Paula. ‘I’m at the house. I saw the solicitor and everything seems to be more or less in order. Now I’m going through her papers.’

‘What for?’

‘Looking for bills, that kind of thing. Hey, what do you remember of the journey out to Cyprus?’

‘What’s that got to do with it?’

‘Something I found. A ship’s menu, actually. The
Empire Bude
.’

‘I was little more than a baby. Five? Six? I just have impressions of the ship – wood and plastic and rather dark in the cabin. Like a railway sleeping compartment, I think. And being woken up when we went through the Straits of Gibraltar. And women crying.’

‘In the Straits of Gibraltar?’

‘No, you idiot, that must have been before. When we were
leaving. I remember a crowd and the sound of the ship’s siren, and women crying. I’d never seen adults cry before.’

‘You don’t often see it now.’

‘In my line of work you do.’

‘And what about Damien Braudel? Do you remember him?’

She is silent for a moment. ‘What’s this all about, Tommo?’

‘I just asked if you remember him. He was there on board, you see. You remember Mum and Dad talking about him?’

‘Vaguely. Didn’t something happen to him?’

‘Right. You see, you
do
know. He was murdered by EOKA. But he was one of your fellow passengers on the
Empire Bude
. I’ve got his signature on a menu. And I’m rude and able—’

‘I wouldn’t put it as strongly as that, although you do tend to go after young women—’

‘—is an anagram. They played anagrams. Don’t you remember? Hidden dreamer? Don’t you remember her saying that? She was the hidden dreamer. Don’t you remember?’

‘No.’

‘Well, she used to. And this is where it came from, I guess. They were playing anagrams at dinner one evening.’

‘Sounds innocent enough.’

‘Who said anything about guilt?’

‘You did.’

A hot, dark room, ransacked by shadows. In the room there is a bed, strewn with sheets. Among the sheets, on the bed, two figures, naked, glazed with sweat, limbs locked together. Their movement is violent and staccato, with no beauty to it. There is sound, a rough grunting, neither male nor female, barely even human. And then abruptly all is over and the two figures part, and lie for a moment side by side among the ruin of the sheets. She sits up, running her fingers through her hair so that she is lifting it up in a cloud – an uncharacteristic gesture he has never seen before. Her breasts hang
loose, each tipped with a dark disc. One of her legs hangs off the bed; the other is up, the knee bent. Her lap is a deep shadow that crawls part way up her belly.

She turns and speaks to the man, but the words are not distinct. Just the tone.

Then she looks towards the door.

‘It’s all psychological,’ said Major Braudel.

They stood at the railings of the stern promenade deck, watching the wake and the gulls swooping down for garbage. They were somewhere in the Bay of Biscay and the weather was warmer although the sea was the same, long Atlantic rollers meeting the ship on the starboard quarter, rolling and pitching her at the same time, the very worst sort of motion. But somehow her body was beginning to accept it and she was starting to feel better. It was rather like recovering from a bout of flu: she felt weak and elated at the same time.

‘How does saying it’s psychological help?’

‘It doesn’t help at all, really. But it’s an interesting point.’

‘Not if you’re seasick, it isn’t.’

There was a squad of soldiers doing physical training on the deck below. The soldiers had undernourished figures and pale skin that looked as though it was being exposed to the sun for
the first time ever. A drill sergeant shouted commands and the men made Xs and Ys of themselves, and bent to touch their toes.

‘What are those men doing?’ Paula asked.

‘They’re making themselves big and strong,’ Major Braudel told her.

‘They look weedy to me.’

‘That’s the problem.’

Braudel was an officer of one of the two battalions aboard. He was tall and slender, with pale hair. Perhaps his hair colour made him seem young, as well as his symmetrical features and smooth complexion. Certainly he seemed more youthful, more enthusiastic than Edward. The evening before, he had come over to their table and tried to persuade Dee to dance. The band had been playing and there were one or two couples attempting a wayward foxtrot. But she had claimed that she was still unsteady on her feet, and still a little queasy, so instead he had gone off to the bar and returned with a glass of some murky concoction that he presented to her with comic solemnity. ‘What you need is a brandy and milk. Does wonders for a hangover.’

‘But I haven’t got a hangover.’

‘You soon will have, if you drink all that brandy and milk.’

That had made her laugh. It had been the first laugh since leaving the Needles astern. He introduced himself to the others at the table. His Christian name, he confessed with some embarrassment, was Damien. ‘After the apostle to the lepers.’

They hadn’t understood the reference.

‘A Belgian priest who went to Hawaii to look after lepers. My father was Belgian, you see. And a devout Catholic. He came to England during the Great War, married my mother and never went back.’ He looked at Dee thoughtfully, almost embarrassingly. ‘Where’s the accent from?’

‘Can you hear it?’

He grinned. ‘Ee ba gum.’

‘Sheffield,’ she admitted; she
admitted
it. It annoyed her, that she should not be proud of the fact.