Swimming to Ithaca

by Simon Mawer

The subsequent two days were spent in a kind of limbo, confined to the cabin for hours on end, relieved with occasional walks along the promenade deck and rare visits to the dining saloon for toast and tea and mashed potato, which were Binty’s recommendation for treating seasickness. Binty and Douglas she already knew vaguely, but it was inevitable that now they would become close friends. Acquaintances became friends quickly in this world of enforced company. Binty was small and vivacious and Douglas was tall enough to make the matter of their physical coupling seem a bit of a mystery. ‘Laurel and Hardy’ was what Edward called them, which wasn’t fair because Binty was quite pretty and hadn’t got a moustache, and Douglas was anything but lugubrious – rather a dry wit in fact. There were others on board, the Powells, and a meek little man called Nissing, and Marjorie Onslow. Marjorie was large and jolly, and she mothered everyone. She mothered Paula and Dee, she mothered Binty and she would have mothered Jennifer Powell if she had been allowed; she was going to mother soldiers and airmen because she worked for SSAFA, the Soldiers’, Sailors’ and Airmen’s Families Association, whose role was to mother those who were far from home. She claimed that an ancestor of hers had given his name to Onslow Gardens. ‘I thought that was the Earl of Onslow,’ said Jennifer, who knew that kind of thing. Marjorie rolled her eyes. ‘My lips are sealed.’

  ‘I don’t expect they’re alone in that,’ Jennifer said. Her husband was a colonel on the Governor’s staff in Cyprus, a man who seemed to be constructed out of mahogany and patent leather, buffed and polished until he shone. Jennifer possessed a kind of superior vulgarity that Dee had never before encountered. She was a large woman within the boundaries of whose body you could glimpse the outline of a once slender young girl. She described herself in equine terms. ‘Once upon a time I was a pretty foal, then a fairly successful hunter and later a good brood mare. Now I’m afraid I’m just a hack: a safe ride, but no longer very exciting.’

  Nissing was in the Ministry of Public Buildings and Works. ‘Works and Bricks, are you?’ Jennifer said. ‘Should think so with a name like that. Call you Hut, do they?’

  The man smiled. He’d learned to smile. It was a full two days before it was revealed that his Christian name was Rudolf.

  And apart from those passengers, there were also the officers of the two embarked battalions, young subalterns doing their National Service, and more senior officers who had the air of men grown old beyond their years because they had seen action in Suez, in Palestine, in Korea, in the war. The CO of one of the battalions was accompanied by his wife, and she became the doyenne of the civilian passengers, seated regally at the captain’s table while lesser beings were invited to dine there on a rotation whose precise details seemed as arcane as the rankings of the British peerage.

  Dee hid behind her seasickness and her faint Yorkshire accent and watched all this whenever she could. Paula was often somewhere else, playing with children from the other families on board, and for much of the time Dee lay in her bunk while the world of their cabin twisted and turned around her, and her stomach with it. Binty referred to Dee’s complaint as mal de mer, as though you needed to be French to feel pukey. ‘You’ll be over it in a while,’ she assured her. But for the moment it appeared a permanent state, like being a semi-invalid.

  Three

  Thomas is giving a class at the university. The class is on the historical method: Historiography, Module 101, worth twenty credits towards History, Modern, Single Honours. It consists of a dozen youths – eight girls and four boys. In a strange way he thinks of his students as more or less his contemporaries. Objectively that has long since ceased to be the case, but he has always suffered from a curious illusion: that whenever he is with a group of people he is always the youngest in the room. This is still plausible enough at meetings of the Academic Liaison Committee, chaired by the Vice-Chancellor and presided over by half a dozen bores who remember when the place was still a polytechnic; but sustaining the idea in the present company amounts to some kind of minor delusion. Nothing to awaken the interest of a psychiatrist, but definitely bizarre.

  ‘Never forget,’ Thomas says, ‘that the word “history” is cognate with the word “story”. What I mean to say by this is that history is, essentially, a narrative. Just like a novelist, the historian is creating a narrative intended to explain something.’

  A hand goes up. ‘What does “cognate” mean?’

  ‘Related to.’

  ‘So why didn’t you say that?’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Why use complicated words when a simple one will do?’ The speaker is a youth of about twenty (they are all youths of about twenty) with a prominent Adam’s apple. This, more than the length of his hair or the structure of his body, defines him as male.

  ‘Sorry, I didn’t get your name.’

  ‘Eric.’ Eric cocks his head to one side, as though saying his name is some kind of challenge. His black T-shirt has TUNC written across the front.

  ‘Well, Eric, do you like Indian food? Curry, stuff like that?’

  ‘Yeah.’ He draws the word out into at least three distinct phonemes. Clearly he feels that this has suddenly become an interrogation; he is reluctant to admit anything.

  ‘But when you were a kid, I’ll bet you preferred burgers. Well, words are like that. Grown-ups can usually manage rather more demanding fare than kids.’

  The class laughs, all except Eric. Thomas has won, but it is a temporary victory, a mere skirmish. Eric will counter-attack later on, and every week throughout the life of the class. He will counter-attack and eventually he will destroy any group feeling that the class may acquire, and thereby he will win.

  Thomas continues: ‘The fictional narrative is created out of ideas in the novelist’s mind; so too the historical narrative. The difference is that the historical narrative is expected to operate within certain bounds: it has to pay attention to the various bits of evidence that exist – documents in archives, pieces of physical evidence, archaeological artefacts, maybe first-hand eye-witness accounts. Yet these are just relics, things left over and endowed with a significance by the mere fact of their survival. We cling to them like survivors of a shipwreck clinging to flotsam – a broken chair, a piece of railing, a lifebelt.’ He smiles as he elaborates his analogy: ‘And while we grab for these chance relics, we must always remember that the ship itself, the wreckage of the past, is slowly sinking into the depths below us.’

  One of the girls giggles. ‘Like the Titanic?’

  ‘Just like the Titanic,’ Thomas agrees. ‘The Titanic exists in our minds as a historical icon, a piece of narrative – film, book or whatever – while the remains are actually there on the bottom of the seabed …’

  The girls are remarkably similar to the boys, most of them. Almost all wear jeans, all wear T-shirts, most have pieces of cupro-nickel embedded in various parts of their faces – a ring in this eyebrow, a stud in that nose, a cannabis leaf impaled in an earlobe. Thomas wonders about other, gender-specific possibilities. Does that girl, seated next to Eric and fidgeting all the time, perhaps have a gleaming ring through the nub of her clitoris? Does the one with the orange brush on her head maybe have a stud through a pink and perky nipple? But then, he wonders, does Eric?

  Only one of the women really stands out from the rest. She is wearing a silk shalwar-kameez and, among the funereal blacks and greys, glows as brilliantly as a gemstone. What is her name? Sharaya? Something like that. Inviolate, he guesses. Inviolable as well, in all probability. She too has something stuck through her nostril: a fragment of ruby gleaming like a bead of fresh blood. Next to her is the only girl wearing a skirt. She may be older than the others, but it’s difficult to tell. That’s what fashion does these days – reduces everyone to the pubertal. Thomas catches her eye and, gratifyingly, she smiles back at him.

  ‘And then there’s another problem,’ he says, addressing this girl alone. ‘That is the whole question of narrative. Did people in the past live out a narrative? Do we ourselves live
out a narrative? I think the answer is no. Events just happen. No one is writing a story.’ He pauses, smiles acerbically. ‘You might walk out of here and get hit by a bus. A purely contingent event. It wouldn’t be part of any story, and no self-respecting author would allow it to happen halfway through a novel and just finish the thing there and then. But it might happen in reality. And in reality other people might make a story out of your life, with the bus as a dramatic and tragic conclusion.’

  The slide projector has been set up ready, pointing at the screen on the wall. He switches it on. ‘Can someone turn out the lights?’

  They are plunged into a sultry darkness. ‘Where’s the popcorn?’ Eric’s voice asks.

  ‘Look,’ says Thomas, and there she is, suddenly on the screen, thirty-three years old, standing against the car in the bright sunlight of decades ago.

  ‘Take this, for example. A photograph, a relic, one of those pieces of flotsam. What do you make of it?’

  There’s an uneven silence, a scuffling of feet and a few inarticulate whispers:

  ‘Who is she?’

  ‘Where is it?’

  ‘That’s what I want to know,’ Thomas says. ‘Answers to all those questions.’

  ‘When is it?’ asks the skirted girl.

  ‘The car’ll give it you,’ says Eric, who is, apparently, something of a connoisseur. ‘Nineteen-fifties, isn’t it? Ford Consul, or summink. Vauxhall, it’s a Vauxhall. Victor.’ It is unclear whether he is claiming victory or whether that is the name of the model.

  ‘And it’s not England, is it?’ someone else says. ‘The architecture.’

  ‘And that sky. Maybe you could identify the plants.’

  ‘And what about her? Hockey player is she? Strong legs.’

  ‘Trust you to notice that.’

  ‘Who is she?’

  ‘She’s class, isn’t she?’ says a male voice. ‘Posh. Somehow you can tell that.’

  Eric puts in another word. He appears to be enjoying this. ‘Surely the point is this: does it matter?’

  ‘What do you mean by “matter”?’ asks the girl in the skirt. Wondering what her name is, Thomas glances at the list in front of him. He can barely read the names in the backwash of light from the projector. Kale? Can it be Kale? Have they named her after a cabbage?

  ‘Well, is she of any historical significance?’ Eric asks. ‘That’s the point, isn’ it? It’s historians that decide. That’s what Tom here is trying to say, isn’ it? So, who is this woman? Does she matter, historically speaking?’

  ‘She certainly mattered to my personal history,’ says Thomas. ‘She’s my mother. Was. Was my mother.’

  After the class the girl in the skirt – Kale, it is Kale – lingers behind. Clearing up her books, or something. The others push out of the room and head off down the corridor leaving her alone.

  ‘Is it really Kale?’ he asks.

  She looks up with a quick smile. ‘Cognate with cabbage, you’re thinking.’

  He feels his stomach lurch, the sensation you get in a fairground, on the big dipper or something. ‘You don’t look much like a cabbage.’

  ‘It’s Kayley, actually. Cognate with Kelly. That’s what my mother always told me. Irish.’

  ‘And you believed her?’

  ‘Don’t you always believe your mother? Didn’t you believe yours?’

  ‘I didn’t always know what she was telling me.’

  She stands there looking at him. She has short hair and thinly pencilled eyebrows and wide-open eyes. Her lips glisten. They form a complex piece of topography, a recurved bow, something convolute and secretive. She’s wearing a black leather jacket and a blue denim skirt and her legs are bare. He has already noticed them, of course. White and smooth, as though she has just waxed them. A slight sheen. ‘How about some lunch …?’

  She looks at him thoughtfully. What is she seeing in his expression? A bit unnerving, really, that kind of collected, composed look in an undergraduate. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘I’m meeting my boyfriend.’

  ‘Oh. Right. Maybe another time?’

  A shrug. ‘Why not?’

  It was W. H. Auden. He remembers that as he watches the girl leave the room. W. H. Auden claimed to suffer from the same illusion, that in any group of people he always felt that he was the youngest present. Mind you, Auden wouldn’t have entertained the other illusion that Thomas has, the one about the girl called Kale, the one where she’s standing in the middle of the seminar room with her skirt round her waist and her knickers round her ankles.

  Thomas creeps through his mother’s house like a spy. He searches through the darkened rooms like a thief. Time passes. There are the letters he has already seen, neatly piled besides some household bills. On the top, the one from Geoffrey Crozier. Crozier never came to the funeral, despite Thomas writing to tell him. When was that? Two weeks ago? Two days? Time is a malleable dimension. Historians struggle with dating, with calendars and chronologies, but the human brain treats time in cavalier fashion. Her death seems months ago, and only yesterday.

  He opens drawers. More papers, letters, photos. He leafs through them without method, cursing himself for being so unprofessional, for stirring up the archive, for destroying those subtle matters of placement and orientation that may themselves provide fleeting, ephemeral information. Later, fearfully, he goes into her bedroom where there is the wardrobe painted with flowers, and the dressing table with its clutter of potions and creams, the chest of drawers and the queen-size bed, covered still with its eiderdown. He can taste the smell of her in the air, the last exhalation of her presence. The drawers of her dressing table reveal a froth of silk and cotton, things that had once lain close to her flesh, but never as close as he. He plunges his hands into the drawer and lifts a muddle of clothes to his face and breathes her in. For a moment she is there in his brain, conjured up by her smell, her scent, the haunting effects of some portion of the brain – the limbic system, maybe – to evoke a whole presence. Redolence is close to recollection. Why is that? Where is the history of smell?

  ‘Tom, what on earth are you doing?’

  A flash of heat in his face. He shoves the things back in the drawer, his hands shaking. ‘Just looking, Mummy.’

  She crosses the room, glances at him curiously, closes the drawer. ‘Well, you mustn’t look without asking,’ she says, and crouches beside him to take him in her arms; and her smell is there, infusing his brain, muddled up with the whole of him. Her breasts large and soft. He wants to see them. He wants, for a shameful, suppressed moment, to suck at them.

  He opens other drawers and inside the last, lifting aside some woollens, he discovers a manila envelope. The word Oddments is scrawled across the flap in her handwriting – he remembers the characteristic flourishes, the slant and attack, the style that once brought breathless excitement whenever he received a letter from her. Her handwriting is as redolent of its creator as her features and her voice, and her smell.

  Oddments.

  Thomas takes the folder through into the study. He can’t deny a certain quickening of the pulse, a certain tremor in the bowels as he sits at her desk and slides the contents out on to the polished wood. There are a couple of newspaper cuttings, a photo, a crumpled, faded bill from a restaurant, a typewritten menu and, in a folded sheet of plain paper, a pressed flower – a cyclamen. He unfolds the newspaper cuttings. The first one includes a poem, one of Geoffrey Crozier’s, entitled ‘Swimming to Ithaca’. And there’s a sheet of plain paper, brown with age, with another poem on it, typewritten and dedicated. For Dee, with affection, Geoffrey. This one’s called ‘Persephone’. Something about Lethe, the river of forgetfulness that guards the entrance to the underworld. He puts both poems aside. The second cutting is altogether more interesting to the historian. It has the name of the newspaper – the Times of Cyprus – pencilled across the top in her handwriting, along with the date: 15th May 1958. At the head of the story is a portrait photograph of a man wearing a uniform cap. His feature
s are smoothed by the morbid hand of a photographic studio and his smile is hopeful, the kind of smile you wear when you are putting a brave face on things before going off to war. The story below reads:

  BRITISH OFFICER SHOT

  A British military spokesman reported yesterday that Major Damien Braudel, of the Second Battalion of the Ox and Bucks Light Infantry, died in Limassol on Wednesday of gunshot wounds. The precise nature of the incident is not yet clear, but Army sources said that the probability is that it was an E.O.K.A. action. Major Braudel had been on Cyprus for one year with his regiment, during which he had been involved in operations against E.O.K.A. bands in the Troödos Mountains. He leaves behind his wife and two children. Next of kin have been informed.

  A vague recollection stirs, like the elusive image of a dream that remains with you after waking. Damien. And Braudel, a name that memory suddenly and surprisingly gives him as Brawdle. Even that is evidence of a kind, the fact that the misspelled name has lain in his mind all those years, to be lifted out of memory and compared with the actual spelling in print before him. He tries not to pursue the recollection lest it fade away entirely. Instead he turns to the photograph that lies tantalizingly face-down on the desk, with that crisp concavity that is caused by shrinkage of the emulsion. Two inches by three, with deckle edging. Written on the blank back – again, her handwriting – is the name Nick.

  It’s like playing pelmanism, that childhood game where all the cards of a pack are placed face-down and you have to pick them up in pairs, recalling where the failures were so that others may be matched. He turns the photograph over and reveals a black and white snap of a car. It isn’t a car that he recognizes – it’s some kind of 1950s model, possibly American, with a wide band down the whole length of the body just below the windows.

  Yellow stripe for taxis, white stripe for hire cars. Why does he remember that? What random bits of circuitry bring that kind of fact floating out of the depths? And which was this – yellow or white? The stripe appears darker than the ground beneath the wheels or the blinding white wall behind. A taxi, then, in bright sunlight. With the driver standing by the door – a young man in white shirt and dark trousers and dusty shoes with pointed toes. His black hair is swept back in a cowlick, his eyes and mouth are smiling. And Thomas’ mother is standing beside him, her face composed, her hands clasped in front of her, her eyes hidden by dark sunglasses with thick plastic frames. She is wearing that full cotton frock, decorated with fruit – oranges and lemons. Her waist is narrow, clinched by a wide belt. But there is nothing else, no other hint from the past, no faint footprint to mark the passage of something or someone. Just the photograph of a young man – in his twenties? – and Thomas’ mother – in her thirties – and a taxi parked outside a garage. And the only significance that it carries is that it is here, preserved for over forty years in an envelope marked Oddments. Mere survival is evidence.