Swimming to Ithaca (2 page)

Dear Deirdre …

My Dearest Dee …

Dee darling …

Dear Mrs Denham …

One or two were in his own childish handwriting, the weekly letters he had been constrained to write from boarding school.

Dear Mummy,

It is raining here and we can’t go out. I’m not very happy because 7/6 isn’t really enough. Can you please send me a postal order, please. Not much. 5/- would be alright. Yesterday (Sat) we played St Anthony’s. I didn’t score but Maloney did.

There were similar offerings in Paula’s childish hand and, in contrast, one or two from their grandfather, composed with a certain quaintness, like missives from a previous century:
My Dearest Deirdre
…
with great affection, your loving father
.

Time passed, signalled by the sound of a carriage clock that she had bought at an antique shop in York and which beat like a pulse on the shelf above her desk. The speed of time disturbed. How do you measure it? Seconds, hours, days, years, centuries of course – but that’s not how it is. Time isn’t a scalar dimension like distance or mass; it’s a vector, like acceleration. It can vary, speed up, slow down, deviate. At times it can be like struggling uphill – a boring afternoon, a visit to the dentist – while at others it’s like freewheeling and the wind is in your hair and you haven’t noticed the ditch that lies ahead. The problem with time is that in order to measure it you need to have somewhere to stand outside it. Give me a fulcrum and a place to stand and I will move the Earth. Archimedes, of course. Thomas felt the need for something similar, a place outside time from which to observe and measure its passage.

Another letter.

My darling Dee,

May I, after all these years? Perhaps I shouldn’t. Dear D, then.
. Ya sou. Do you remember how I tried to teach you
some Greek? And how we laughed? Or perhaps you have put all that behind you, stuffed it into the part of your memory that is reserved for painful things.

The reason I am writing is that time has passed, and time, surely, is the great healer. But not only healer. Emasculator. Whatever is the female equivalent of that, I wonder? Effeminator doesn’t sound right, does it? Anyway, it was all so long ago and now I fancy that you might not be too appalled to recognize my writing again and perhaps reply. No obligation on your part, I assure you.

Geoffrey

Geoffrey Crozier: a small, dark man with an uproarious laugh and something of the attitude of a market trader. ‘Always sounds as though he’s about to try and sell you something,’ that’s what Thomas’ father used to say.

Attitude. There was this man walking along the street, and the wind blew his hat off. Well, off he goes running after it, but just as he’s about to reach it, there’s this dog, grabs the hat and eats it. The man shouts to the dog’s owner: ‘Oi! Your dog’s just eaten my hat.’

‘Oh yeah?’ the dog’s owner says. ‘Well that’s
your
problem, mate. In this wind, you should have held it on.’

‘Oh,’ the man with the hat says. ‘That’s your attitude, is it?’

‘No, mate,’ the dog’s owner replies, ‘it’s not
my
’at ’e chewed, it’s
your
’at ’e chewed.’

Paula shrieking with laughter. She didn’t really understand the joke, but Geoffrey was laughing uproariously, and so was their mother, so Paula laughed too. ‘Attitude!’ Geoff would cry from then on, and Paula would double up in laughter. Attitude! Attitude!

There were other words in the vocabulary of laughter:
‘pellucid’ was one, and ‘anemone’. ‘Pellucid,’ Paula would say eagerly, and Geoffrey would wince. ‘Rude,’ he’d cry. ‘Rude.’

Thomas took the pen and a blank sheet of paper and wrote out a transliteration of Geoffrey’s Greek salutation, and discovered meaning hidden beneath the unfamiliar letters:
Me poli agapi
: with much love.

And what would she have written in reply?
My darling Geoffrey
?

He put the letter aside. Ideas were crawling through the undergrowth of his mind, memories circling behind him, tantalizingly just out of sight, but always there, like threatening shapes in the shadows. From a photograph on the top of the bureau, she looked back at him from thirty-five years ago, with that tired, unhappy smile that had been her trademark. The expression seemed almost derisive now that he was reading her mail.

‘What are you looking for, Tom?’

‘Unpaid bills, that kind of thing.’

‘You know how organized I was. You’ll not find anything out of place.’

‘What about letters from Geoffrey Crozier?’

‘What about them?’

‘Who was he, Mother?’

‘A dear old friend. What’s wrong with that?’

‘You tell me.’

But she didn’t. Just the smile.

He got up from the desk and went to the bookshelf. The book wasn’t there, but eventually he found it downstairs in the sitting room, a narrow volume with the title in faded gold lettering down the spine:
Aphrodite Died Here
. He recalled flicking through it as a child and seeing the author’s name on the title page, being told by his mother that this was what Geoffrey did when he was being serious, which wasn’t very
often as far as Thomas could see. ‘Geoffrey is a very clever man,’ she always told her son.

Now for the first time he glanced through the pages with adult eyes. The date of publication was, in Faber’s rather pretentious style, mcmlvi. Inscribed in ink on the inside of the cover – the same hand as the letter – there was this epigram:

Priceless is the measure of your glance

But worthless is my gaze.

Treasure are the words you spoke

But paltry is my praise.

Shelley? Byron?
To Dee, with great affection, Geoffrey
, it said beneath. The poems themselves were very different in style, free verse, full of allusions to things Levantine and sexual and classical, the kind of stuff that Lawrence Durrell might have written. He read over a few of them, and then returned the book to the shelf.

‘Mother?’ he said out loud.

The silence in the house was complete. She wasn’t there. There was no one there, not even Thomas. He was merely a watcher, standing out of time, while in his memory his mother and his father flickered between what they had been when he was three and thirteen and twenty-three; and all the time they were ageless. He held their hands and swung, three years old, across the lawn outside the block of flats where they once lived in Oxford. He refused her hand and walked, thirteen and solitary beside her, down a street in Gütersloh in West Germany. He sat across a squalid student room and argued with her about politics or morals or music, and was twenty-three. And then, abruptly, memory released her and she aged, rapidly, fearfully – and became grey and thin, wasted by the disease, lying in her hospital bed, about to be pulled out of time and into eternity.

‘Mother?’

No answer.

He got up from the desk and wandered into her bedroom. In the wardrobes her dresses and suits hung like flayed skins in the shadows, scented with the perfume that she wore for as long as he could remember, always the same perfume.
Scent
. ‘Women wear perfume, ladies wear
scent
,’ she always used to say.

Paula would have to go through the clothes. She’d have to get out of her bloody deadlines and commitments and things. She’d have to do her bit.

The phone rang just as he returned to the study; almost as though his thoughts had conjured her up, it was Paula: ‘What are you doing?’

‘I’m going through her stuff. Someone has to do it.’

‘Can’t we deal with it after the funeral?’

‘There are letters to write, people to contact. Can I send you a list of people to call? I can’t do it all myself. And someone has to go through the papers—’

‘Just make a bonfire and burn them.’

‘Share certificates and all? And the deeds to the house? There’s the solicitor and the will and things like that. You don’t seem to understand. There’s her clothes, but you’ll have to do them. I’m not going through her knickers and petticoats.’

‘I told you – after the funeral. Incidentally, I’ll have to bring the children. Will Phil be there?’

‘Probably.’

‘Good. Send me that list. Can you fax it?’

‘I suppose so.’ He put the phone down. As he turned back to the task in hand the doorbell rang. The sound startled him, as though he had been caught doing something illicit.

He went down to open the front door and found a woman standing outside. ‘Yes?’

She looked as though she might just have stepped off a boat:
unkempt hair, a shapeless sweater and trousers that were too short; boat shoes on her feet, those canvas things with leather thongs for laces (although ‘thong’ meant something else nowadays). Ought he to know her? Her face was vaguely familiar, lined and tanned even though it was spring and the weather lousy. Fiftyish. Lean, almost masculine. ‘You’re Thomas,’ she said, holding out her hand. She blinked as she spoke, as though things were flying in her face.

He took the proffered hand. ‘I’m afraid …’

‘I have you at a disadvantage? That’s what they say, isn’t it? I’m afraid I have you at a disadvantage. I’ve seen pictures, you see. I’m Janet. Janet Burford. Maybe Dee mentioned me? How is she? That’s what I called to ask. I know how ill she is and I was just passing by and I saw that someone was here, and …’ She shrugged, looking over his shoulder into the hall. Perhaps she was checking to see if he was up to anything suspicious. Perhaps she wasn’t sure that he was Thomas after all. Maybe she had just guessed. Maybe she was the local Neighbourhood Watch.

‘I’m afraid she’s not here,’ he said. ‘She died.’

She put her hand to her mouth, blinking again. ‘Oh God.’

‘Yesterday afternoon …’

‘Oh God, I’m so sorry.’

‘Yes, well, there you are …’ What a stupid thing to say. As though remarking on the fact that this woman, Janet Whatever-she-called-herself, was indeed there, and not, like his mother, no longer there. Or anywhere else, come to that. He cast around for something to say. The word ‘say’ rang in his mind. He lived by saying, talking, standing there in front of dozens of bored students, pontificating, mouthing, declaiming, a whole thesaurus of utterance. Why do people always have to say things? Why couldn’t they just keep silent? ‘Look, I …’

‘No, I …’ The woman hesitated, shifting her feet on the doorstep, blinking. ‘I used to come round and have, you know, coffee with her. We chatted. I’m so sorry. I’d better go. I’m sorry, awfully sorry. I …’ And she turned and went, hurrying across the road to the far side where there was a pub called the Fisherman’s Catch. She walked quickly past the pub windows, leaning slightly forward. Not bad-looking; but that bloody blinking.

T
here were two manifestations of Thomas at the funeral. One was focused only on the misery, on the vastness of loss and the exquisite lack of hope; the other watched the sorry procession of coffin and bearers, the heaped flowers, the hieratic gestures of the priest, with something like satisfaction at the sight of ancient ritual being enacted under the dead elms of the country graveyard. That aspect of him regarded the mourners dispassionately. There were about a hundred of them, emerging from all corners of the British Isles. Cousins and aunts and uncles, of course, but also others, distant friends coming forward out of childhood memory, as though characters in a play had suddenly stepped down off the stage and mingled with the audience, where they were now revealed without the make-up that had made them seem so young during the performance.

‘We never realized she was so ill …’

‘We’re so awfully sorry …’

‘She was so wonderful a friend. And your father as well …’

‘What a shame we lost touch …’

After everything, after the coffin had been lowered into its pit and a handful of earth scattered on top, and the undertaker’s men had got down to work like navvies, they all went
back to the house, crowding into the sitting room and the kitchen, spilling out into the narrow garden at the back, commenting on the lovely flowers dear Dee had planted, and look, how clever the way she’s done that trellis and put in those climbing roses – the present tense stumbling awkwardly back into the past.