Swimming to Ithaca (11 page)

Binty was spreading a rug on the ground, and finding plates and cutlery, putting out the food, getting things organized. ‘Geoffrey, what on earth are you going on about? For goodness’ sake shut up and do what you’re good at – open that bottle of wine.’

He did as he was told – ‘Ah! The old trout’s a soak!’ he cried – but Dee had understood that his words had been neither casual nor whimsical. When they were settled and they all had a glass of wine and the food was being passed round, she asked, ‘That was a quote, wasn’t it, that “who knows this island?” business?’

He smiled gratefully. ‘“The nightingales won’t let you sleep in Platres/Tearful bird on sea-kissed Cyprus.” Greek poet called Seferis. He was here a few years ago. Yiorgos Seferiades is his real name. He’s a diplomat, works for the Greek Foreign Office.’

‘I didn’t know you liked poetry, Geoffrey.’

He shook his head. ‘I don’t really. Often I loathe it. But it likes me. You know the kind of thing? Hangs round me like an unwelcome friend. The kid at school that no one gets on with, and I’m too damn kind to tell him to bugger off, and of course everyone judges me by him. Oh,
Geoffrey
, they say: he hangs around with old Poesy. Funny fella.’

‘Do you write it as well?’

‘I try. That’s a very different thing.’

Only later did she come across one of his pieces, published in the
Times of Cyprus
. She kept the cutting on her bedside table. She preferred poems that rhymed, of course, but she thought she understood what he meant. There was much about this
island that she had not expected, either. And she fancied herself in the midst of her own particular Odyssey.

Swimming to Ithaca

When I first came ashore on Ithaca

I expected something different.

The grey olives, fingering the wind,

Were predictable enough.

The asphodel, with its cat’s piss smell,

Anticipated.

And of course I knew it would be hot and dry.

But when I first came ashore at Ithaca

It was Penelope who surprised me.

Her manner with the suitors,

And her impatience with my stories.

And the relationships she had been weaving

In my absence.

I had hoped to find an ally in Telemachus

But he just shrugged his shoulders

And asked where I had been all this time.

Expedience had become habit, that’s the trouble.

I’d been halfway round the world,

And no one cared to listen.

We become our absences.

O
ne day she went into the town on her own. You weren’t supposed to do this. You were advised against being on your own, despite the truce that had been declared by EOKA.

‘I want a taxi,’ Dee said to the owner of the grocery shop.

‘My cousin,’ was his reply.

And so, half an hour later, his cousin came with the taxi. The vehicle was a large, brash Opel Kapitan, a model that you didn’t find in Britain but you saw everywhere on the island – flashy and chrome-trimmed, like an American car. It wore a wide yellow stripe down one side, which signalled its status as a taxi, and scabs of pink undercoat paint all over it, which signalled its owner’s status as a driver of flair and masculinity. Cyprus racing colours, the British called the patches of undercoat it bore, or Cyprus blush. He laughed when she told him. The cousin was called Stavros. He was a portly man, with remarkably small feet for so large a body. He emerged from behind the steering wheel of the Opel like a dancer executing some intricate passage, a
paso doble
or something. Taking Dee’s hand he bowed over it as though it were the hand of the Queen of the Hellenes, or perhaps Penelope’s or even Aphrodite’s. ‘My lady,’ he breathed. ‘Please.’

Dee noticed that the nail on the little finger of his right hand was disproportionately long, nurtured and cultivated like a pet. She felt a tremor of disgust. He seemed entirely untrustworthy. Used to Yorkshire plainness, she was suspicious of anything that might be dismissed as flannel, and flannel Stavros certainly possessed. ‘More flannel than a haberdasher’s,’ her Aunt Vera was wont to say.

With great ceremony she was ushered into the back of the car and the door slammed shut. Again that fluid shuffle, and Stavros was behind the steering wheel, peering round with a smile of white and brown and gold. ‘Where my lady want to go?’

‘Just into town,’ she told him.

He looked pained at the idea, at the tragic waste of talent that this would involve. ‘But I take you anywhere.
Anywhere
, lady. Nicosia, you want Nicosia? I take you Nicosia. Shops? Bars? I take you. Kyrenia? I have cousin in Kyrenia sells thinks, good thinks, good price. I take you there.’

‘Just into town, thank you,’ repeated Dee, and there was something in her manner that told Stavros that they would be going no further, at least not today.

That was her first real expedition on her own. She, who was happy enough walking by herself on the moors above her home town, was thrilled with the excitement of being on her own amid the racket of a Mediterranean port, walking beneath palm trees on the seafront, sitting outside a café on a rickety iron chair to drink Turkish coffee and eat drippingly sweet
kadeif
, witness to the noise and anarchy of the town. Edward was flying that morning, and she looked up, squinting against the brilliant sun while a Meteor jet, glinting silver, traced a fine line of white through the sky above the Akrotiri peninsula. Was that him? She imagined him there in the cockpit, his face hidden behind the rubber oxygen mask that smelled the same as condoms, his gloved hand holding the control column with a kind of delicacy while he pulled it back into his belly and sent the jet soaring towards those faint brush-strokes of cirrus cloud that were all the eastern Mediterranean could manage. ‘That’s my husband,’ she wanted to call out to someone. ‘There, flying high above us all.’

Later she went and found Marjorie Onslow, at work at her SSAFA canteen near the harbour. ‘I’ve escaped,’ Dee confessed. ‘Come out on my own.’

Marjorie was delighted to see her. ‘Jolly good thing too. If you like you can always give me a hand here.’

*

That afternoon, after Paula had come back from school, Binty picked them both up and they went swimming at Lady’s Mile. There were some other women there, camped among the paraphernalia of the beach – deckchairs, umbrellas, rugs and mats. ‘What on earth do you do all on your own, Dee?’ she was asked. ‘You must come out with us more often.’

She smiled at them apologetically. She didn’t drive, she explained. And she rather liked being on her own in Limassol. She felt closer to the spirit of the island.

‘Limassol?’ There was a collective shiver of disgust. ‘Ghastly place. Now Kyrenia’s all right, and Nicosia’s tolerable. But Limassol! Anyway, you’ll soon be in married quarters, won’t you?’

She supposed so. There was discussion about these, debate about whether one could live in Berengaria village where the Paxtons were, or whether it was better to hold out for something in the military base itself, on the cliffs above the village of Episkopi. Within the base there were various suburbs – Gibraltar, Kensington, Paramali. Paramali was the ideal, a kind of royal court, where the senior officers’ houses circled around the mansion of the C-in-C like planets orbiting the sun. But Edward was only a wing commander and would be lucky to get a house there.

The conversation shifted to other matters. She listened to talk of the behaviour of the Cypriot leaders who didn’t know what was good for them, and the young hoodlums who were quite happy to grab a pistol and shoot an innocent civilian in the back, of the British politicians and the Governor who was a good chap, being a soldier. He’d sort it all out.

Someone mentioned the EOKA leader, Grivas. The name brought a thrill that was almost sexual, as though he were a rapist on the prowl. The previous year a photograph of him had been
published in the newspapers – a snapshot of a mustachioed rogue sitting on a tree stump in a woodland clearing with his merry men around him. He was known as Dighenis after a legendary hero: it was like calling an Englishman Robin Hood. ‘They’ll get him,’ the women said. ‘He’s a diabetic, needs a constant supply of insulin. So they’ll get him that way.’ Was this true? A strange banality, to find your enemy through his medical prescription.

The young children ran about in the sand and splashed in the shallows while the women called to them to be careful. Talk drifted easily away from politics, to families and schools. Those who had children at Lancing College and Charterhouse were admired, those who could afford only lesser places were pitied. One family had their children at Eton; but they did not come swimming with this group.

‘Where’s Tom?’ the women asked her. On the seesaw of social acceptability the faint hints of Yorkshire in Dee’s voice brought her down, but Tom’s preparatory school in Oxford raised her up. She thought of him languishing in the ink-stained shadows, estranged from home and parents, being bullied, perhaps. The thought made her eyes sting. And then came a different, more dreadful thought: that perhaps he didn’t miss his family, that he was growing up and away already, callused by separation to a hard indifference.

That evening she spoke to Edward about swimming at Lady’s Mile, but she didn’t mention her morning expedition into town. It was her experience alone and not a thing to share. And perhaps he might forbid her to do such a foolish thing, and then she would be obliged not to, whereas now, with the matter not even mentioned, no one could gainsay her. She was not a solitary person, but her situation had made her so and to her surprise she enjoyed the new experience.

G
eoffrey Crozier came by. He arrived shortly before lunch one day, after the maid had gone, when Paula was at school and Dee was pottering about the house; later she speculated that perhaps he had been watching the house to make sure that this was so. But she was not displeased at the visit. He made her laugh when they met up at parties, and Edward liked him well enough. They’d even gone on an expedition to a monastery with him – a place called Stavrovouni, which, Geoffrey explained, meant the Mount of the Cross – although she and Paula had not been allowed to enter the building itself. ‘The poor old priests would get over-excited at the sight of you,’ Geoffrey said. ‘They’d come over all faint.’ He’d taken Edward into the strange and scented shadows and explained about how the services were conducted and how the incense was made and how they painted icons and how the monks never washed because they considered dirt to be a gift of God. That was the thing about Geoffrey, there was always a ridiculous joke lurking just beneath the surface of one of his solemn dissertations. He was fun, aslant from the military world that she found herself living in. So she was not displeased when she peered round the front door and saw him standing there on the veranda. She was not displeased, but she was faintly embarrassed by being caught off guard. She was wearing shorts. She only ever wore them around the house and somehow she felt almost undressed when confronted by him, dressed as he was in a lightweight suit and holding a panama hat across his front. ‘Geoffrey, what on earth are you doing here?’

‘Do you think I shouldn’t be?’ He stepped into the cool shadows of the hallway. ‘Gawd, do you think Edward would be suspicious if I he knew I was visiting the little woman behind his back?’ He made to pick up the phone. ‘Tell you what, I’ll give him a ring. Edward, I’ll say, I’m here alone with your little wife. Is that OK?’

She grabbed his hand to stop him. ‘Don’t be idiotic.’

‘Ah, so there
is
reason for him to feel aggrieved?’ He grinned at her discomfiture. ‘Don’t worry, love, your secret is safe with me.’

She laughed her moment of panic away, tossing her head and leading him through into the sitting room. ‘I’m certainly not your love,’ she called over her shoulder as she went. She knew he was watching her legs as she walked. She was barefoot, her soles cool on the tiles. She didn’t know whether she should go and change. ‘What can I get you? A nice cup of tea?’

His cry of repugnance delighted her. ‘Isn’t it a bit late for that? Breakfast’s over long ago, and anyway I only drink coffee. But now it’s midday, more or less, so gin, I think. Pink for preference.’

‘I don’t even know how to do pink gin,’ she said, and so, as though he were letting her into a great secret, he showed her, swirling Angostura Bitters round a glass in a solemn ritual. ‘This is the blood,’ he said, raising the glass to catch the light. Then he poured the gin, and handed the glass to her. ‘And this is the Holy Spirit.’

‘Don’t be blasphemous.’ She took the glass and sipped the liquid with care. ‘But it’s practically neat!’

He nodded sagely. ‘Like so many fine things, the secret is in the “practically”.’

Out on the veranda – ‘See? We’re out in the open. No secrets to hide’ – she wondered what to talk about. She was aware of her bare legs, and his eyes on them. Her shorts were cutting into her. She shifted to make herself more comfortable, and thought that she must seem awkward, fidgeting self-consciously under his gaze. ‘I found one of your poems,’ she said. ‘In the
Times
. “Swimming to Ithaca”.’

‘Oh, that.’

‘Who’s Penelope? How did it go? “But when I came ashore at Ithaca/It was Penelope who surprised me.” Is that Guppy?’

‘Guppy?’ He gave a hoot of amusement. ‘Grief, no. Guppy’s only ever had limericks written about her. There once was a lady – I’m not really sure about the “lady” bit but that’s what you say in limericks – There once was a lady called Guppy/Who suffered severe cynanthruppy—’

‘What on earth’s that?’

‘Cynanthropy? Psychiatric condition: you think you’re a dog. Don’t you learn nothing at school these days? She tried a relation/With a randy Alsatian/But settled for a fuck with a puppy.’

‘Geoffrey!’ Dee stood up uncertainly, disconcerted by his smile and his gaze and the shocking obscenity that he had uttered. ‘What horrid language.’