Swimming to Ithaca (40 page)

‘OK, I’ll do what I think best.’

‘There’s a train at five to one. I’ll be at the station to meet it.’

‘Right.’

He wants to say other things. He wants to say that she means everything to him, that he wants to spend the rest of his life with her, that he loves her; but he dare not say any of them. ‘See you’ is all he manages, before he cuts the line and turns back to the wardrobe. Methodically he gets the other clothes out – the dresses, the skirts, the slacks – and lays them on the bed, neatly in rows, like laying out so many corpses. Then he begins to empty her drawers – underwear, sweaters, blouses, the whole mass of garments tossed on to the bed along with the other things, and then everything stuffed into black plastic bin bags. Like evidence being taken away from the scene of a crime, evidence of a life being consigned to the limbo of forgetting. He humps the bags downstairs to the hallway. There is a dozen of them by the end.

He glances at his watch. In his imagination Kale and Emma take the Underground away from the land of concrete and graffiti and waste. He pictures the train rattling in its tube deep beneath the river, with Kale clutching her daughter’s hand and staring at the black window, while strap-hanging
men jolt speculatively against her. He imagines the pair of them standing on the escalator as it slides them up from the depths at Liverpool Street, Persephone and her daughter returning to the upper world from Hades.

In the sitting room the fire has taken, the coals cracking in the heat and glowing a dull red. A faint, luminous flame hovers over them. There are other things to do. He goes up to the study and with care he assembles the evidence: the letter from Geoffrey, the envelope of
Oddments
with its burden of ship’s menu and its few typewritten sheets, the newspaper cutting, the two poems, the circumstantial photograph.
Nick
.

He carries his little bundle down to the sitting room, moves the fireguard aside, then crouches down and feeds the pieces of paper, one by one, into the flames. Each sheet curls and wrinkles and browns before flaring into brief and intense life. The black skeletons float in the hot air for a moment, as fragile as memories, before shattering against the firebricks. He watches the small holocausts of incident and memory, until finally only the photograph remains. This is made of sterner stuff than the rest and it takes longer to burn. It curls, the emulsion cracking and charring, the two figures staring out at him like bodies in a cremation while the circle of black constricts around them. Then the flames billow, consuming everything.

If there is no evidence, there is no history.

The doorbell rings. It’s the man from Oxfam, complete with the white van that he has borrowed, so he says, from a mate. Together they hump the bags into the back, and Thomas hands over a tenner for his trouble. He stands and watches as the van draws away before turning back to the house.

The place seems different now. Void, empty of something fundamental. He goes through into the kitchen to get something together for lunch. Will Kale come? He hopes, imagines, doesn’t dare to doubt that she is even now standing beneath the
departures board at Liverpool Street Station, looking up at the letters and numbers flickering over, the dominoes falling; with Emma beside her, clinging to her hand.

He’s about to start eating when the doorbell interrupts him again, but this time when he opens it he discovers Janet Burford on the doorstep. She stands there blinking, her feet planted wide as though she’s on a deck and not going to be put off by any rocking of the boat. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘I hope you don’t mind, but I saw you clearing things out earlier and I thought I’d drop in.’ She looks over his shoulder. ‘Are you alone? Do you think I could have a word?’

‘I was just starting lunch. I’ve got to meet someone at the station.’ Is Kale even now sitting in the train with Emma beside her, the pair of them watching the dull Essex flats pass by the window?

‘Just a sec. Please.’

‘Can’t we make it some other time?’

‘I’d rather not.’ There’s a blunt stubbornness about her presence, as though she has made up her mind about this and is determined not to be put off. Reluctantly Thomas steps aside to let her pass. He follows her into the sitting room and watches as she looks round as though to see what’s missing. Then her eyes light on the only tangible thing that Kale and he share, the piece of pottery that she gave them, that sits now, like a gynaecological specimen, on a shelf beside the fireplace. She picks it up and runs her hands over it fondly, as she did with the piece of Meissen that stood there before.

‘You and Kale. Are you still together?’

‘She’s meant to be coming this afternoon. With her daughter.’

Her eyelids flicker. ‘How nice. I’d love to see her again. She’s such a lovely young woman. Strong, isn’t she? Lots of guts. And I’d love to meet her little girl. Maybe you can come round. Would you like to? This evening if you want.’

He shrugs. ‘Look—’

‘I love children. But somehow I didn’t dare have them when I was married. I thought I might destroy them if I did.’

‘Why are you so special? Every parent risks that.’

‘Because I almost destroyed myself?’ The upward lilt, as though she isn’t quite sure about the destruction and wants reassurance on the point. ‘And now I’m too old even if I wanted them. So whose responsibility was that? Mine, I suppose. I don’t know. Who’s responsible for someone being what they are? That’s what I mean about being a parent. And I was adopted, so there were other factors, weren’t there? But you can’t blame my adoptive parents. They tried their best …’ Her voice trails away. She seems close to tears.

‘Look, can I get you something – a cup of tea or coffee perhaps? And then I’m afraid I must ask—’

‘No, it’s all right. I’m fine, really, Tom, I’m fine. I don’t want to put you to any trouble.’

Tom? He’s not Tom. He’s never been Tom, not since leaving school. He’s always been Thomas. Tom only to his mother, and now Kale sometimes. But not this woman, who is looking at him now with something approaching fear, as though the distress she has shown is his fault. What was it Kale said about her? She’s damaged.

‘Then perhaps—’

‘Have you heard of a man called Charteris?’ she asks. The question has nothing to do with what she has been saying – it’s a symptom of the erratic way her mind works, like that bloody blinking. ‘Charteris,’ she insists. ‘Didn’t Dee ever mention him?’

‘Look, I’ve really got things to do …’ He moves as though to show her the door.

‘
Tom
Charteris?’

Thomas stops. ‘Yes, she did. He was an old boyfriend of hers, back home in Sheffield. Killed in the war.’ A pause. ‘But I never knew his name was Tom.’

‘There’s a lot you don’t know. You see, Tom Charteris was my father.’

And Thomas
can
see. Suddenly, fleetingly, he can see the resemblance. It’s like a familiar face recognized in a blurred photograph – something about the cast of her eyes and the set of her cheek and jaw. He sits down heavily in the other armchair, the one that was his mother’s. He’s no longer inclined to try and stop her. In fact he’s bound to hear her through to the end: it’s his duty, more or less. ‘Go on.’

She opens her hands. They have been clenched tight and now that she relaxes them there are the marks of her nails in the palms, and the scar tissue on her wrists that Kale noticed. ‘Where do I start? With me as a little girl, wondering about them? You do, of course, once you’ve been told the truth.’ Her face works in that convulsive manner, as though the machinery beneath the skin, the delicate articulation of nerve and muscle and tendon, has broken. ‘As a child I used to lie in bed and imagine them coming to rescue me. How was I to know that he was dead? Of course I wasn’t. But my mother was still alive, and she never came looking either. Never at all. Well, she wouldn’t have, would she? She’d barely even seen me. I was hardly even a memory.’

‘And then?’

‘You come to terms with it after a fashion. You get on with your life and make of it what you can. Which in my case wasn’t a great deal. A failed marriage, work of sorts – a bit of sculpting and pottery. I even taught for a few years at an art college. And then, some time after the break-up of my marriage, I decided to find out for myself. It was me who went looking for her.’

She pauses, as though to leave him space to speak. But he hasn’t anything to say. All those words have come to nothing.

‘I made enquiries – the local council, the birth records, forms to fill, interviews, pleading, pleading. It’s weird, distressing, like
your own past is someone else’s secret and they’re not letting you in on it. And then, of course, if you do find out, you have to make contact indirectly in case the other person doesn’t want to know. You can’t plead, you can’t persuade. All you can do is ask a plain question, through a third party. “Do you want to meet me?” It’s like appealing to a jury and waiting for the verdict. Guilty or not guilty? Nothing in between. But she agreed to a meeting.’ Janet makes a sound. It might be a cough, might be the sound of choking. Tears have gathered in her eyes once more. ‘So here I am, Tom. Here I am.’

And it’s there again as she stares back at him, that familial likeness, the shadow of a past cast forward into the future. He shakes his head, searching for something coherent to say. ‘There were things she said. I thought … I don’t know what I thought, really. I had this idea she had betrayed my father. All those years ago in Cyprus.’

Janet smiles. ‘She never betrayed your father, Tom. Or you, or Paula. She betrayed me.’

T
he station is little more than a halt – a single platform with a small shelter and a single track coming to a single pair of buffers. The end of the line. He waits, looking down the rails, where they converge in the distance amidst trees and grass banks and the low grey sky. There is a single gantry with one of those old mechanical signals on it, the arm slanting upwards.

He waits.

A voice crackles out into the still air announcing, barely intelligibly, the arrival of the 12.55 train from Liverpool Street Station. Apparently as a result of the announcement, as though words can conjure up events, the train itself appears, at first no
more than the idea of a train, a mere spot at the distant apex of perspective.

Thomas watches it grow larger. Of course, it’s only the illusion of perspective that makes it grow, just as the perspective of memory throws things into different proportion according to how you see them; and everything is larger in a child’s world.

And then the train rolls over some subtle boundary and it is no longer there in the distance, but here, present, a steel and aluminium tube sliding alongside the platform, groaning and grinding as the brakes go on, a sealed capsule painted and daubed, with windows and doors and lives inside, the present lives of however many people there are who have come out to the far reaches of estuarine Essex on an afternoon of one Friday in early summer.

The doors bang open. Passengers climb down on to the platform and look around in that uncertain way they have when they arrive at their destination.

He waits, watching for a slender, pale woman and her little girl.