Swimming to Ithaca (4 page)

‘It’s not
that
ancient.’

‘Isn’t it?’ He pressed the reverse and there she was again, leaning against the now familiar car. He saw now that she was about to say something. The smile was half a smile, half an opening of the mouth to speak. What was she going to say? What
did
she say on that day more than three decades ago?

‘Do you know what she said to me?’ Thomas asked.

‘
Then?
’

‘No, a few weeks ago.’

‘I expect she said many things.’

Should he tell her? He had not really made up his mind, even as he uttered the words. He could have made something else of it, could have recalled some childhood moment, fabricated some adolescent incident. But he didn’t. ‘She said she believed her illness was a punishment.’

Paula was quiet. She no longer shifted in the armchair in the shadows behind him. But her stillness wasn’t something negative, an absence of movement; it was active: she held herself in check, as you might hold yourself in against laughter or against tears.

‘She say anything like that to you?’

‘What did she mean by it?’

‘How do I know? But I wonder.’

‘What do you wonder?’

‘What it was. That made her feel she deserved punishment.’

‘Isn’t that her business?’

‘She’s dead now. She’s not there to have any business.’

He pressed the advance button and the house slid back into place, and pressed once again to move the house on.

A family group stumped through the cold across the top of some mountain plateau. ‘That’s Troödos,’ Paula cried.

‘And that’s Geoffrey, isn’t it? With Mother.’

He pressed the advance again and there once more were just the two of them, Dee and her little girl, crouching in some field amongst poppies, dozens of poppies around them so that it looked as though they were crouching in a bleeding graze, the kind of thing you get on your knees when you fall on gravel, the blood bubbling up in a dozen little gouts. The pain. ‘I remember that,’ Paula said. ‘That picture, I mean. I remember it being taken …’

She paused, watching the figures as though something was about to be enacted there in that distant view of a field bleeding with poppies. But nothing and nobody moved.

They had lunch in the pub across the road, and afterwards went for a walk along the desolate waterfront. The river was flowing against the wind so that the wavelets had their tops blown into smithereens, like smashed glass. There were sailing boats moored in ranks, their rigging vibrating in the wind like the rattling of snare drums. Are they called ratlines because they are always rattlin’, or are they called ratlines because rats run up them? One of Geoffrey Crozier’s jokes. The riverside path ran along the top of the sea wall. And at the end, below the level of the path and therefore at sea level more or less, there was a house. White-painted weatherboards and a wooden porch. He stood looking down at it for a moment. ‘That’s the blinking woman’s. You know. Janet What’s-her-name.’

‘You mean the woman who fancies you?’

He ignored the taunt. ‘I’ll bet she gets in a flap when there’s a flood warning out. I’ll bet her eyelids go like bloody gnats’ wings. She’s almost below sea level.’

‘So’s most of the town.’

As they watched, the side door of the house opened and someone came out. Her brown woollen skirt and loose-fitting shirt were visible from where they stood. There was a brief altercation with what appeared to be a dog, and then the woman went back inside. ‘That’s her. Blinking Janet.’

‘She’s a potter,’ Paula said. ‘That’s what she told me.’

‘Obviously she’s a potter.’

‘What do you mean, obviously?’

‘Looking like that. Obviously she’s a potter. She’s probably a vegan as well. And a firm believer in homoeopathic medicine. And practises Zen Buddhism.’

‘You’re a bigot.’

‘I’m a historian. Historians see the patterns in things.’

They turned and made their way back along the path towards the town. ‘Perhaps it was Geoffrey Crozier,’ he suggested.

‘What do you mean? What was Geoffrey Crozier?’

‘That made her feel guilty. Perhaps they had an affair.’

‘Don’t be daft.’ She looked round at him. ‘For goodness’ sake, Tommo, what’s the matter with you? On no evidence whatever you’re accusing Mummy of having a sneaky fuck with a friend of the family forty years ago. I mean, what’s your problem?’ Her anger was real.

‘He was always around, wasn’t he? And she always talked about him. And that letter, you’ve read that letter.’

‘That’s bugger all. You need facts, hard facts.’

‘But there’s no such thing. Facts die, just like people. All that remains are scraps – and we have to do our best with those.’

‘This is the historian speaking again, is it?’

He smiled at her anger. ‘Never anything else.’

They paused at the far end of the main street, looking down the row of houses towards the clocktower and the Ship Hotel and the row of one-time fishermen’s cottages. Graham’s Volvo had just drawn up and the children were piling out. They could hear Linda’s laughter, and even Philip was shouting something in excitement. Graham caught sight of them and waved.

‘At least they’ve had a good time. Are you sure about taking Phil back to Gilda’s?’

‘Of course I’m sure. It’s not out of the way.’

Surprisingly Paula took his hand and squeezed it. ‘It’s us now, isn’t it, Tommo?’

‘What do you mean, “us”?’

‘In the firing line. And in thirty years’ time it’ll be them.’ She laughed. ‘That’s what history teaches us.’

*

Dear Thomas,

I was most awfully sad to hear of your mother’s death. It was kind of you to write and let me know. I am very sorry that Bill and I were unable to be at the funeral but a longstanding and important appointment in London meant that we couldn’t make it. Although we exchanged Christmas cards, I had not seen Deirdre for many years, but I recall our days in Cyprus with great happiness – they were wonderful times, although often tinged with sadness. My best wishes to both you and your sister, whom I remember with particular fondness on the voyage out.

Yours ever,

Jennifer Powell

They embarked at Southampton Docks. Gulls laughed and jeered at the scene. There were families gathered on the quayside and soldiers drawn up in ranks, and a regimental band played ‘A Life on the Ocean Wave’. The troopship gleamed white against the dockyard buildings and the grey water.

‘When do we see Daddy?’ Paula asked.

‘Soon.’

‘Tomorrow?’

‘A few days. Twelve days, they say.’

‘Twelve days is for ever.’

Dee’s parents had come down to see them off. There was a restrained parting, the pecking of cheeks, the assurance of mutual care and concern, the impatience of Paula to be off. ‘You look after your mummy now,’ said Dee’s father to his granddaughter, and Paula, who seemed happy to play the games of adults, agreed that she would.

Soldiers humped kitbags on to their shoulders and filed up the gangways, turning and waving to the crowd. ‘A Life on the Ocean Wave’ changed to ‘Will Ye No Come Back Again?’. Women wept.

‘Why are they crying?’ asked Paula, who had never before seen adults in tears.

‘They’re crying because their husbands are going away. Like when Daddy went away.’

‘But you didn’t cry.’

‘I tried not to. But I was very sad.’

‘And now you’re not sad. Because we’re going to see him.’

‘That’s right.’

Officers and their families boarded by a different entry port from the men: different gangway, different cabins, different decks, different worlds. Dee and Paula climbed up to where a sailor and a white-coated steward stood at the port. They might have been entering a hotel: inside it was all wooden panelling and mirrors and brass fittings, and a desk with uniformed receptionists. Only the plan on the wall – the various decks, the muster stations marked in green, the restricted areas in red – betrayed the fact that this was, in fact, a ship. That and the plaque that showed the vessel in bas-relief sailing into a bronze sunset. Apparently, she had once been the
Königin Luise
of Bremen, launched in 1925 as part of the Norddeutsche Lloyd passenger fleet. But now she was the
Empire Bude
, and British voices were raised loudly beneath her ornate plaster ceilings, the voices of the victors.

The purser was magnificent in navy blue and gold braid. He checked their names against a list, and presented Dee with the keys of the cabin as though she had won some kind of trophy. ‘Welcome aboard, Mrs Denham,’ he said. A steward led them along the deck and up a companionway, down a narrow corridor, past rows of doors almost like cells in a prison.

‘Here we are, ma’am.’ He opened a door with more of a flourish than the cabin deserved. It was narrow and claustrophobic, little bigger than a sleeper compartment in a railway carriage. A window looked out on to the promenade deck and the davits and underside of a lifeboat.

‘Will we go rowing?’ Paula asked.

‘I hope not.’

They unpacked excitedly, finding neatly hidden cupboards to stow clothes, putting out their washing things neatly round the sink, folding nightclothes under pillows and hanging Dee’s dresses – few and cheap – in the narrow wardrobe. The bathroom was next door. ‘I expect we have to share it with other cabins,’ she told her daughter.

‘Will there be other girls for me to play with?’

‘Perhaps. Now let’s go up and watch while we set sail.’

‘Is it a sailing ship?’

‘It’s a steam ship, but that’s what you say – set sail – even if it’s a steam ship. You say different things in a ship. The floor’ – she tapped with the toe of one shoe – ‘is the deck. And this’ – she pointed to the ceiling (she could actually touch it, if she stretched), and her tone was less certain on the point – ‘is the deckhead.’

A voice came from the Tannoy in the corridor outside, calling all visitors to return to shore. ‘Now come on, let’s go and see. We can wave to Grandpapa and Grandmamma.’

They hurried on deck. Her parents waved from among the crowd, where families of officers and other ranks were muddled together, because the quayside was the territory of civilian democracy rather than military rank. The moorings – great hawsers of woven steel – were cast off. The distant, submarine rumble of engines rose in pitch and volume and made the deck shiver beneath their feet. Around the stern, where the soldiers were lined up, seawater was churned into the whiteness
of dirty washing, while above their heads, from the side of the yellow smokestack, a siren blew like a call for the dead to awaken.

‘Wave!’ she cried to Paula. ‘Wave at Grandpapa and Grandmamma! Goodbye, Grandmamma! Goodbye, Grandpapa!’ And Goodbye, England, she might have added. Goodbye many things. She felt a childlike excitement, an emotion that quite matched anything Paula might be feeling. There were two kinds of foreign travel, and until this moment she had experienced neither. There was ‘abroad’ and there was ‘overseas’, and the latter was much the more exciting of the two. ‘Abroad’ could be nothing more than a day trip to Calais, but ‘overseas’ was Empire. What they were doing now was supremely overseas.

‘Wave!’ she cried, waving herself, and making out the diminutive spots of her parents’ faces, the two of them stripped of feature by distance and yet, like out-of-focus photos in a newspaper, incontrovertibly those of her mother and father. Faces that she had known and loved and that had always been there when she needed them. Almost always.

‘Where are they?’ Paula cried, as though seeing them was somehow important, vital even. ‘I can’t see them. I can’t see! I can’t see!’

Dee pointed. ‘There. Over there.’ And then, quite suddenly, she couldn’t make them out either. Maybe they had turned away. No, surely not. Surely they would still be waving as, to the trumpeting of its own and other invisible sirens ashore, the
Empire Bude
edged out into the Solent. Somewhere a band still played. ‘Rule Britannia’, that absurd and bumptious tune.

‘I can’t see Grandpapa and Grandmamma,’ Paula said. ‘They’ve gone.’

Clouds hung above the docks like damp, grey blankets over
basins of dirty suds. Gulls wheeled and tilted behind the ship and the quayside where they had embarked diminished as though they were looking at it through the wrong end of a telescope, until it was no longer dry land inhabited by waving, weeping people, but had become a mere underscoring of warehouses and cranes, a boundary between the grey sky above and the grey water below.

She held Paula’s hand tightly. Her eyes stung with tears, but whether they were tears for the parting with her parents, or tears at the absence of Tom, or tears of sadness that she did not feel quite guilty, wasn’t at all clear.

They stood at the rails to watch the coast slide past, the oil refinery at Fawley, the Isle of Wight away to the left, which was, Dee pointed out to Paula, ‘port’.

‘What’s port? The port’s what we’ve just left.’

‘That’s right.
Left
is
port
.’ Dee laughed. It seemed absurd. Paula laughed too, perhaps at the sight of her mother laughing. ‘On a ship,’ Dee explained, ‘you
leave
the port, and
left
is port. Maybe that’s how you can remember. Left is port and right is “starboard”.’

‘Starboard’s silly,’ Paula said bluntly. The engines drummed beneath their feet, a percussion that was to accompany their very existence throughout the voyage. The water slipped past like oil and their whole world shifted very slightly, as though to remind them that nothing was secure from now on.

‘Where are the waves?’

‘The waves will come.’

The waves came. The ship passed through the narrows between Hurst Castle and Sconce Point, out of the Solent and into the Channel, and the waves came. The vessel began to pitch into the water, shuddering slightly at each impact, like a genteel lady at some repeated solecism. The Needles
were away to port. There was a breath of spray in the air. ‘It’s lovely, Mummy!’ cried Paula; while Dee felt the tremor of the ship transfer itself organically to her stomach, and quite suddenly the excitement was not so wonderful, the day not so thrilling, the sensation of guilt at the idea of Tom, abandoned in his prep school, not so acute. Quite suddenly what mattered was the feeling of nausea that spread from her abdomen throughout the channels of her body to her joints.