Swimming to Ithaca (32 page)

‘Aunt Vera?’

‘My mother’s sister. Her husband was a master cutler.’

‘What the hell’s a master cutler?’

‘Very important. In Sheffield.’

‘We’re not in Sheffield now. You can have different ideas.’

‘Oh, I do. Many different ideas, most of them impossible and all improbable.’

He smiled. ‘That’s you, isn’t it? All that difficult stuff. You want to keep things simple.’

‘But what if they are complicated? This is complicated.’

‘No it’s not, Mrs D, it’s easy.’ And as if to demonstrate the simple fact of it he eased her towards him and bent down and touched his mouth on hers. ‘See?’

She swallowed. There was a feeling of panic, something inside her throat cutting off her breathing. Like looking over the edge of the precipice, daring to step off.

‘You’ve been wanting that, haven’t you?’ he said.

‘Have I? How can you tell? All those girls you’ve had?’

He shrugged. ‘Not so many.’

‘But some …’

‘One or two.’ Then he kissed her again, and this time his tongue moved between her lips. She spoke against his mouth. ‘Please,’ she said, and he laughed.

‘Please what?’ His hands were lifting her dress, touching the bare flesh above her stockings, and her own fingers were scrabbling at the buttons of his shirt, and going inside and finding the hard corrugations of his ribs. And then the fragile barricades of propriety and rectitude, of inhibition and restraint, broke and there wasn’t anything else, nothing articulate, nothing rational. ‘Nick,’ she said. ‘Nick.’ Just the sound of his name repeated like a mantra as he lifted her dress and pulled it off
over her head and she stood almost naked before him in the shuttered bedroom, beside the sly yellow reflections of a beaten brass side table that she and Edward had bought on a visit to the Turkish quarter of Nicosia.

He lifted her. That was the ridiculous thing. He lifted her up like a child, picked her up off the ground and carried her to the bed, and laid her down. No one had ever done that with her before. And then he was pulling at her underthings and she was undoing his trousers and the two things were happening together, an awkward, breathless scrabbling at each other, all shame cast aside. No speaking, just a breathless doing.

Goats in the road, and long-tailed, ragged sheep. What the British call shoats because, so the story goes, they are a hybrid between the two species. The shepherd wears knee-high black boots and baggy black trousers. A Turk. The trousers are because when the Prophet comes to earth again he will be born of man rather than woman, and so the men wear these trousers, just in case. That’s what Geoffrey says, anyway.

‘Geoffrey says all sorts of things,’ says Binty. She taps her fingers on the steering wheel as the sheep mill around, this way and that, and the shepherd shouts at them and swats with a branch he has pulled off a bush. Over there are some houses, the outermost houses of the town, battered and decaying. And the minaret of a mosque.

‘You said it would only be a few minutes out of our way, and here we are stuck in a traffic jam,’ Binty complains.

‘Animal jam,’ says Tom. ‘Not traffic jam.’

Binty recites: ‘Mother dear, what see I here/That looks like strawberry jam?/Hush, hush, my love, it is Papa/Run over by a tram.’

In the back seat the boys laugh and push each other while the sheep swirl and complain round the car. One of them is on its hind legs, pulling at the leaves of an olive tree growing at the roadside.
Udders like the bladders of a football. The boys giggle and push at the back of Alexandra’s seat. ‘Tits,’ they whisper. ‘Tits.’

A faint breeze crept with stealthy fingers across her belly. She rolled away from him and sat up, lifting up her hair to cool her neck, looking back at him where he lay. He hadn’t much hair on his chest – less than Edward’s. His nipples were smooth and dark, like damsons. Everything was different, each little detail. His limbs were sinewed – only the arms suntanned. His cock lay limp against his thigh, its glistening head now hidden within a monk’s cowl. She had never seen an uncircumcised penis before, not on an adult. Why was it called a cock? As in hens and chickens, pecking at you? Or taps, faucets, spigots? Or pistols? She’d wanted to kiss it. When he put his tongue in her mouth, she’d wanted his cock in there. She’d never felt that before, neither with Edward nor with Charteris. The idea disgusted her; and yet she wanted it. There were so many things she wanted.

At that moment – precise in memory – there was a movement beyond the doorway, a sound. She gave a small cry of surprise.

He sat up. ‘What’s up?’

‘Something, someone.’ Panic rose in her like gall. Grabbing up her dress, she got up from the bed. In the sitting room across the hall the french windows were still open. The curtains rose and fell. Sunlight was smeared across the floor and one of the walls, and beyond the french windows was the luminous green of the garden.

Her heart was beating fast. What had she thought? An intruder or something. But there was nobody, just something lying on the tiles, a chased-brass bowl, another piece they had bought in Nicosia at that market. She picked it up and put it back in place. Exterior sounds came in from the outside world –
birdsong, insect noise, the barking of some dog shut away in a nearby farm, the noise of a car. ‘I left the windows open.’

He had appeared at the door, anxious.

‘I thought someone was in the house,’ she said.

‘Cats, maybe.’

Cats, of course. Or just the wind catching the curtains. Anemone, the wind flower. She went over to close the french windows. How far had the sun moved since he had come? It was like a sundial. She remembered a sundial on a church wall. Eyam village, St Lawrence’s Church in Eyam. She and Charteris had discovered it. Fancy remembering that. ‘You need an equation of time to read it accurately,’ he had said. An equation of time. She needed an equation of time, in which the solution could be zero, time suspended, so that this moment, alone and naked with him, could become for ever. Like something preserved in the golden amber of sunlight. That was it. A poetic conceit.

But there was the swell of panic inside her. ‘You’d better get dressed,’ she said.

‘What time is it?’

She found her watch. ‘It’s nearly midday.’ With a small stir of anger she thought of Edward, as though this situation was his fault. He would be ringing this evening and she might have to explain her day. And Binty would be coming back with the children later in the afternoon. She would have to construct her alibi, just in case. She needed to be back among the normal, to consign this moment to a secret, private past. ‘Are you in some kind of a pickle, darling?’ Marjorie would enquire when she asked for her support. And she’d reply, ‘Just a bit,’ and the admission would be enough to get Marjorie on her side. She would be like a criminal. She
was
a criminal, almost. What she had just done was a criminal act until – when? Not long ago. And it was still morally reprehensible, wasn’t it? And
for a moment she hadn’t cared. Everything had seemed justified.

In the bathroom she washed between her legs, towelled herself dry, fixed her make-up. When she came out she found him in the sitting room examining the framed photograph of Paula and Tom that stood on a side table, the two children watching the adults with solemn, well-behaved faces. She wanted their gaze to be elsewhere, but still they watched as Nicos returned them to the table and took hold of her instead. He had rights over her now, rights of memory if nothing else. Things could not be undone.

Something must have shown in her face, for he frowned and touched her cheek. ‘Are you all right?’

Was
she all right? The question suddenly seemed an interesting one. Know thyself. But she didn’t know herself, couldn’t read her own feelings. Love, yes, absurd and irrational. But other things besides, that blend of disparate emotions, insidious and deceptive and disguising themselves in chameleon ways – anger, laughter, depression, elation. And pure physical desire, the need to have him there inside her, a sensation that both shamed and exalted.

‘I’m as right as I’ll ever be. Come on,’ she said, putting his hands aside. ‘We’ve got to go.’

‘You want to get rid of me.’

‘I don’t. I don’t ever want to get rid of you. But there’s nothing we can do, is there? You’d best not come in when we get to Marjorie’s. You know what she’s like. Just drop me and go.’

‘And then what?’

She looked at him. ‘I don’t know, Nick. I don’t know what we do then. I’ve got no idea at all.’

The road rises gently out of the coastal plain, through olive groves and derelict fields. Tom watches out of the window while Binty
talks. He is not really listening. He’s thinking, watching and wondering, consigning things to memory.

‘What do you think, Tom?’ Binty is asking.

What does he think? They’ve been to Lady’s Mile, swimming, and now they’re going to the Paxtons’ house for lunch. This much is certain. They pass a farmyard where a donkey walks round and round a well, turning some ancient contraption designed to draw water to the surface.

What does he think? He thinks there are things you see and things that are hidden; things that you talk about and things that remain forever unsaid. Things that become secrets, like death itself. He holds his football tightly, in case anyone should try and take it from him.

Later they play pelmanism, on the floor of the Paxtons’ sitting room. Binty has joined them. Tom is kneeling on the floor, and Paula is complaining that she never wins. Alexandra is wearing a frock with smocking on the front. She sits cross-legged. If he leans forward, Tom can see her knickers. He mustn’t be obvious about it. He must be calm and casual. Is she old enough to have hair?

Neil reaches out and turns a card. The Jack of Clubs. He pauses, considering the uniform backs of the cards, their collective anonymity.

Alexandra giggles excitedly. She knows, she knows.

Neil stretches and turns another card face-up. The Queen of Hearts.

His sister breathes out in relief, waits for Neil to turn the cards face-down again, and then pounces. There! Jack of Clubs and Jack of Clubs. A pair, snatched away and stored on the carpet by her side. She reaches for another. Ace and Ace, of Diamonds. And pauses, with her skirt stretched tight from knee to knee and the warm triangle of white cotton visible to Tom’s eager eye.

‘This is a silly game,’ Neil says. ‘Let’s go and play football.’

Alexandra protests. ‘That’s because I’m winning.’

‘It’s because you can’t play football.’

Against her protests they abandon the cards and go out into the garden.

She felt quite calm, that was the astonishing thing. She walked into the canteen and apologized for being late, and she felt quite calm. ‘Sorry I’m late,’ she said.

‘Where’s Nick?’ Marjorie asked. ‘Aren’t you going to bring him in?’ She was making sandwiches. She had a large pot of some kind of filling made of mayonnaise and chopped vegetables that she called ‘Saturday-night vomit’. The label claimed it as sandwich spread.

‘I thought it better not. Not after that trouble.’

‘Oh, come on. That was nothing. A silly misunderstanding.’

‘Was it? Did you know that some of Damien Braudel’s men took him in for questioning the other day? I think it’s appalling that they can do that kind of thing, without any grounds, without any reason. It’s like the Gestapo.’

‘That’s what we’ve come to, I’m afraid. Who can blame them really, what with the bombs and everything?’

‘But why should they be suspicious of Nick? He wouldn’t hurt a fly.’

‘I’ll take your word for it, my dear. Now come on, roll your sleeves up and do something useful.’

Nick laid his hands on her memory as she worked. ‘Marjorie,’ she said, ‘did you talk to Geoffrey about Nick? About him and me, I mean. Did you?’

Was there a fractional hesitation on the older woman’s part? ‘Geoffrey? Who’s Geoffrey?’

‘You know perfectly well. Geoffrey Crozier.’

Marjorie frowned, looking over the pot of sandwich spread, her knife poised like a weapon. ‘Is he that bank manager fellow?
Why do you ask? Is something going on? Are you in a bit of a pickle, darling?’

‘Of course not. I just wondered. Something Geoffrey said. He seemed to know about …’ About what? Was she about to protest too much? ‘That we were friends, Nick and me. It really doesn’t matter.’

‘Doesn’t it?’

‘No. No, it doesn’t.’ She let the moment die.

‘How is Edward?’

She shrugged. ‘His usual impervious self.’

‘It’s her business,’ Paula insists. ‘You’ve no right.’

They’re in the sitting room, an expansive place of low sofas and armchairs with french windows looking out on to the dark terrace. Thomas stands in front of the fire, a glass of Graham’s cognac in his hand, looking at the two women. Kale is curled up into the corner of one of the sofas, her legs folded beneath her like a gull’s wings. Her own drink is something as brightly coloured as a boiled sweet, a liqueur Paula and Graham brought back from the West Indies. ‘It’s nothing to do with rights,’ he says.

‘Tommo, she’s dead. You can’t exhume her. It’s indecent.’

He sips his brandy. They’ve consumed two bottles of wine during dinner and he is feeling the elation that comes with alcohol. ‘I’m not exhuming her. I’m creating a historical discourse.’

‘That’s just jargon.’

‘My whole job is jargon. Words, words, fucking words. I think I hated her, do you know that? As a child, I think I hated her.’

‘Oh, Tommo, no! How the hell can you say something like that?’

Kale gives a bitter little laugh. ‘Christ, if I’d hated my mum because of every man she’d fucked … So what if it did happen? What the hell’s it got to do with you? It’s her business, isn’t it? And now she’s dead and you should just leave her alone.’

‘I was always pleased to go back to school, you know that? Pleased to get away from her. I hated boarding school and yet it was better than her. It was the worst kind of hate: the kind that’s nurtured in love.’ He searches for an example. He wants to educate them in this, something that he has only now understood for the very first time. ‘Think … I don’t know …’ He looks at Kale. ‘Think of Steve.’