Swimming to Ithaca (37 page)

She managed a shrug. ‘Nothing. He had a bit of a crush on me, I’ve told you that. He said things.
You’
ve said things, haven’t you? People say things that they don’t always mean.’

‘I meant them.’

‘Maybe he meant them as well.’

He looked up at her. He was no longer sitting back in his chair with his legs casually crossed. Now he was leaning forward across the table, willing her to listen to him. ‘There was something between you, wasn’t there?’

‘Don’t be stupid. We’re friends, that’s all. I used to get cigarettes for him, that sort of thing. And he used to teach me Greek. I bet I can do better than you.
Parakaló, mia oka portokália?
See?’

‘What’s that?’

‘Please can I have an
oka
of oranges.’ She picked up her handbag and moved away, then paused and turned back. It was
suddenly clear. Like the sea water beneath her trembling limbs – clear all the way down to the depths. ‘Who put you up to this, Damien?’ she asked.

‘What on earth do you mean?’

‘Who suggested that you contact me and ask me these questions? Was it Geoffrey?’

He looked puzzled. ‘Who the hell’s Geoffrey? What on earth are you going on about, Dee?’

She stood over him for a moment, trying to sort things out, trying to understand whether he was telling the truth and whether it was possible that he didn’t know Geoffrey, trying to work out whether it was possible that Nicos was a terrorist, whether it was possible that she was here, on Cleopatra Street in Limassol, involved in this little altercation, with passers-by staring. ‘Marjorie’s expecting me, Damien. I’m going.’

He stood. Perhaps he meant to lean forward and give her a kiss, but she didn’t allow him the opportunity, just turned from the table and walked away. She knew he would be watching her, but she didn’t look back. She walked briskly along on the sunny side of the street towards the seafront and only at the corner did she glance back. Damien was standing at the table, watching. He waved but she didn’t acknowledge his salute. She turned and set off along the esplanade.

Nothing had changed. The houses with their peeling plaster, the bar with its empty tables. The wireless blaring out, something from Athens Radio. The waiter at the bar called out to her: ‘You want a drink, lady?’, something like that. They could spot her as English, of course. She shook her head and walked on, wondering about Nicos, wondering what she felt and why she felt it, trying to fit Edward into the terms of the complex little equation that described who she was and what she was doing on this sunny late morning in the spring of 1958 with the British Empire crumbling around her.

There was a sharp report, like a car backfiring. Then another. Pigeons clattered into the air. She hesitated. The fisherman glanced up from his task on the sea wall. Someone came out from the bar, wiping his hands on a towel and saying something in Greek, perhaps to someone still inside.

She stopped. People were staring from doorways. There was noise. Difficult to be precise, really. Disembodied and incoherent noise. Someone ran along the esplanade, or perhaps that had nothing to do with it. Just a boy on an errand. Edward said that cars were always backfiring because they didn’t maintain them properly. It was unburned fuel igniting in the exhaust pipe, that’s what he said. She looked round. Shutters were going up all along the seafront. People were scurrying around as though a storm were expected, carrying chairs and tables in from outside the bars, rolling up sunshades, slamming doors.

She turned and began to retrace her steps, walking purposefully, hurrying now, nearly running. A sort of skipping. It seemed almost light-hearted, but she felt something else, a small, hidden stir of disquiet whose origin was in her mind but which manifested itself somewhere behind her breastbone, and lower down in the sickening depths of her abdomen.

She turned the corner back into Cleopatra Street. There was noise coming from the crossroads at the far end of the street, like the sea booming in a cave. A small crowd had gathered. At the Café Aphrodite the waiter was carrying tables inside. A siren wailed, the sound of wartime. She could see a blue police Land-Rover and some uniforms.

Disquiet swelled and became anxiety. Anxiety is fear spread out thin. Where had she heard that? Anxiety coagulated into fear. She hurried up the street. People were running past her in the opposite direction, scattering into the open space of the esplanade, young boys, perhaps from a school. Shutters were going down on the shops. Vegetables were being carried hastily
inside. Someone, a Greek woman, was wailing – a sound tinged with the discordant tones of the Middle East – and at the crossroads people were shifting round the edge of something, as though they were standing on the lip of a precipice and looking over. There was no coherent talk, just the muttering of imprecations, like in church, and the wailing.

An army Land-Rover drove up. Uniforms multiplied, soldiers as well as policemen. A British voice was giving orders. Dee pushed forward. ‘What’s going on?’ she asked. ‘What is it? What’s happened?’ Someone grabbed at her but she slipped out of his grasp and dived forward through the loose circle of onlookers.

There was an arena, an open space such as a crowd might make round a fight. You almost expected to see two men squared up against each other, fists raised. But there was just a young army officer standing there, and at his feet, half on the pavement and half on the roadway, was a heap of clothing – trousers, shirt, jacket. A twisted foot, shoeless, protruded from one end. The shoe was there as well, standing apart in the road. A polished brown brogue with the shoelace still tied. There was something absurd about the sight. A shoe on its own.

‘Who is it?’ she cried. ‘Who is it?’

A hand grabbed her shoulder and held her tight. ‘Come on, ma’am.’

She looked round and saw an English face, white, blotched with red. A red military cap with the peak pulled down. A military policeman. ‘Who is it?’ she asked. ‘What happened?’

‘I think you’d best stand back,’ the MP said.

‘What happened?’ Her voice rose in panic. ‘I just left someone here. A friend. What happened?’

‘Someone’s hurt. Now why don’t you—’

The officer came over. He was a captain of the Ox. and Bucks. Dee recognized the regimental badge on his beret, the
hunting horn on its ribbons looking like a trinket, the kind of thing you might find in a Christmas cracker. The muscles of his face were taut. He frowned at her. Perhaps there was some kind of recognition. Perhaps he had seen her before, at that Christmas party at the garrison headquarters. ‘Did you see anything?’ he asked.

‘Who is it? Do you know who it is? I was just having a drink – a friend—’

He turned away impatiently. ‘Sergeant,’ he called. ‘Get a couple of dozen men off their arses and go through these houses.’ He waved his hand at the buildings. ‘Round up anyone who looks suspicious. And get on to battalion HQ. Get some more men over here in a hurry. We’re not going to take this kind of thing lying down.’

‘What are we looking for, sir?’

‘Any able-bodied Greek males. Round the whole fucking lot up, do you understand? The whole lot. Anyone under the age of sixty. Where’s that fucking blood wagon got to?’

He looked back at Dee. ‘Why don’t you get the hell out of here? This is no place for civilians.’

‘Is it Damien? Is it Damien Braudel?’ Her voice rose. She could hear it going out of control, climbing the register. Something moved – the pavement, the kerb, maybe the whole street – like a deep seismic disturbance beneath her. The officer grabbed her. She heard his voice calling, and hands holding her, and then her limbs lost all strength and she sat down on the pavement, her legs bent and useless. She was icy cold and sweating, as though she were ill. But she wasn’t ill. There was nothing wrong with her at all. She would just wait a moment and then get up and go back to Marjorie’s and everything would be all right.

‘Come on, darling,’ a voice said. ‘Let’s get you away from here.’

Hands grabbed her, strong, male hands. There was a shop near by, a tobacconist selling cigarettes and pipes and things like that, and they carried her in there, into the warm, comforting smell. A Greek woman escorted her to the bathroom at the back, where there was a threadbare towel and some pink soap and the smell of drains. ‘
Endaxi
,’ she kept saying, ‘
Endaxi
.’ All right, all right. Dee leaned over the basin and vomited, nothing much coming up, just acid slime and stuff, while the woman held her hair back.
Endaxi
, she said.
Endaxi
,
endaxi
.

After a time – how long? What happened to time? What determined its pace, its thrust? – other hands were helping her up and shuffling her out of the narrow confines of the bathroom and she was back in the shop.
Karekla
, someone said, and they produced a chair for her. Someone else came with a glass of water. They ministered to her, and she said that she was all right and please leave her alone, but still they fussed. There was a uniformed police constable, a big mustachioed Turk, standing at the doorway, and a British police officer who came over and introduced himself. ‘Detective Sergeant Higham, ma’am.’ And then there was someone else, a civilian coming forward and crouching down to look into her face, as though she were a patient and he a doctor.

‘What are you doing here, Geoffrey?’

He didn’t answer her.

‘Geoffrey, why are you here?’

There was something in his expression, a dead look, as though the laughter was over and he didn’t have anything else to put in its place. ‘I’ve come to see if you are all right.’

‘They killed Damien, Geoffrey.’

‘I know.’

‘Of course you know. There’s nothing you don’t know, is there?’

‘There are a lot of things I don’t know, Dee. Maybe there are things that you know that I don’t.’

Why was he talking in riddles? ‘Shall we go?’ he suggested. ‘I’ve got a car outside. I don’t really think we can talk here.’

‘But I don’t want to talk. I want to know why you’re here.’

‘Don’t be silly.’ He put a hand on her arm but she shook him off.

‘I’m not being silly. I want to know.’

There was a streak of embarrassment in his expression. Someone produced another chair and he sat down close to her. He patted his pockets and produced a packet of cigarettes. Players. That’s what she had given Nicos. Players Navy Cut. ‘Would you like one?’

‘Yes, please.’

‘They’re not tipped, I’m afraid.’

‘I don’t like tipped. You know I don’t like tipped.’

‘Of course you don’t.’

She noticed that his fingers were stained yellow with nicotine. Had she noticed that before? His poet’s fingers were stained from all the smoking he did. The fact seemed significant, a clue of some kind. He tapped a cigarette on the packet and then carefully put it between her lips, as though she had lost the ability to do such things for herself. There was the little ritual with his cigarette lighter, the flint sparking, the wick catching a flame. She drew smoke deep into her lungs. It calmed her. ‘That’s better,’ she said, which wasn’t true but went some way to describing her state of mind now the nicotine was flowing through her blood. She looked at Geoffrey. His skin was coarse, the texture of the skin of a citrus fruit almost. There was a thin sheen of sweat. And crawling across his upper lip that narrow caterpillar of a moustache.

‘What happened?’ she asked, thinking about Damien, who had been and now wasn’t. Was that possible? Could someone be
snatched through the thin fabric of existence quite so suddenly? Could one just
be
one second, and then
not be
the next? ‘What happened?’ She knew that Geoffrey knew. He knew everything, so surely he knew this.

‘Just wait for a bit, finish your cigarette and then we’ll go and talk.’

‘I’m not going anywhere to talk, Geoffrey. I’m going to Marjorie’s.’

‘I’ll take you there.’

‘I’m perfectly capable of walking. It’s no distance.’

There was the noise of a vehicle outside. She craned round to see but there were too many people in the way – policemen, a few civilians. She heard the engine roaring and a clash of gears. ‘It’s all right,’ Geoffrey said. He was trying to distract her, like a doctor trying to take a patient’s mind of something that was unpleasant and a bit painful. But she knew what they were doing. They were lifting him up on a stretcher and manhandling him into the back of the ambulance. She waited, almost as though she was watching from outside, seeing this woman sitting on the straight-backed chair in the middle of the shadowy tobacconist’s, with the man sitting just beside her, his chair set precisely at right-angles to hers. And the people standing watching, and the squat, ugly vehicle manoeuvring in the street outside. The white panels on its sides with the bright red crosses. Blood wagons, that’s what they were known as.

‘The children,’ he said. ‘Are they all right?’

‘For the moment.’

‘When does Binty bring them back?’

She drew on her cigarette and tapped the ash into the ashtray that he was holding for her. ‘How do you know they’re with Binty?’

P
eople rallied round. That was the expression used. There was a military flavour to it, as though they might be rallying round the colours or something: Binty and Douglas were at her side, and Betty Frindle came round and spent a day with her. And there was Marjorie, of course. A shoulder to cry on, that was how she described herself. ‘How simply ghastly for you, darling. How dreadful.’ The epithets of sympathy, as though Dee had suffered a personal bereavement.

Edward seemed distracted, almost indifferent towards her, until the time when he summoned up courage to confront the issue. ‘Were you having an affair with Braudel?’ he asked.

‘Don’t be absurd, darling.’ She felt almost happy to be able to tell the truth. ‘He was a close friend, that’s all. I could speak to him.’

‘You can speak to me.’

‘Of course I can. You’re my husband.’ He seemed puzzled by that response, as though there was a step missing in the argument but he couldn’t quite see what it was.