by Simon Mawer
‘What’s that you’re reading?’ one of his colleagues asks when they break for coffee.
‘Present. For a child.’
The colleague glances at the book, scowls and puts it down as though it is tainted. ‘Anti-Semite,’ s/he says.
When finally he gets to his office he finds the door ajar. Cautiously he pushes it wide open to discover Kale sitting there, looking thin and pale. Her legs stick out like oars from a beached boat. She gives him a fleeting smile. ‘I told the secretary I had an appointment with you? She was suspicious, but I sort of persuaded her? And I found the door open.’
‘That’s because there’s nothing worth stealing.’ He holds out the book towards her. ‘Here it is. Emma’s present.’
She takes it, flicks the pages over, finds the dedication and looks up. Her smile is lopsided, perhaps guarded, as though she wants a line of escape to be kept open. ‘Emms will love it.’
‘I thought of getting the CD and then I thought, better get the words, so you can read it to her.’
‘It’s great.’ She nods, and puts the book aside. ‘Can you close the door?’
‘And lock it?’
That is a mistake. There is no answering smile. He looks round for somewhere to sit, somewhere other than behind the desk. But it isn’t that big an office and there is nowhere else. He pulls the chair round to face her. ‘So, what happened on Tuesday?’
Kale doesn’t look at him any longer. She is playing with her fingers – slender fingers, each tipped with a nail of gleaming pearl – examining them as though they are recent acquisitions and she isn’t sure how they work. She coils them experimentally round each other. ‘I want to know what this is all about,’ she says, as though referring to some pattern her fingers have made.
‘What?’
‘Oh, come off it. You’ve been kind. Kind to Emma and me and all that. Taking us to Cats, buying me lunch, this book, all that crap. But I want to know what you’re after.’
He shrugs, although she isn’t looking. ‘You make it sound wrong.’
‘You’ve got a reputation, you know that? You’ve been with a load of students, haven’t you? That’s what they say. And I just want to know whether you are just lining me up for a quick fuck.’ A thoughtful glance up at him, mouth delicately twisted. She is biting the inside of her lip, small sharp teeth nipping flesh. ‘I’m not concerned about me. I can look after myself. I’m thinking of Emma.’
‘Of course—’
‘Of course nothing. Just tell it me straight. I’m pissed off with being lied to. Just tell me.’
‘I haven’t lied to you.’
‘So don’t lie now.’
‘I wasn’t intending to.’ Thomas laughs humourlessly, aware of the serious import of things he might say, trying to find the right combination of words. ‘It’s not easy—’
‘To tell the truth?’
‘That’s not what I meant. It’s not easy to answer your question.’
‘That’s an answer.’
‘No, it’s not. The question’s unfair. It’s one of those “Have you stopped beating your wife?” sort of questions. It doesn’t give me any room to move. No, I’m not after a quick fuck, so yes, I must be after a slow one. You know what I mean.’
‘You tell me.’
‘I want to get to know you. Christ, how can you say anything witty and original in a conversation like this? I want to get to know you. I find you attractive – it’d be ridiculous to pretend I don’t – and I enjoy your company. If you don’t mind mine …’ She doesn’t avail herself of the opportunity that he has given her, so he blunders on: ‘As to the other students you mentioned, well, yes, there have been a few. Probably fewer than rumour has it. The historical narrative often differs from reality. And there haven’t been any hard feelings – well, nothing more than normal. OK, I’ve exploited my position, but they’ve enjoyed the exploitation. Mostly. Anyway, no one ever complained.’ He shrugs helplessly, aware that she has given him rope and he is busily tying it round his neck. A mere shrug is never going to be sufficient to dislodge it, and might even throttle him. ‘That’s all I can say, really. No pressure, no promises, no quick fuck. Maybe a slow one. If that’s what you want. Unless Steve’s in the way.’ And then he falls silent, wondering if he has just kicked the chair away from under him.
She looks up. Her eyes are tired, as though she has been kept up half the night looking after Emma. He wants to kiss them, just touch his lips on to those blue-grey lids. Will he ever be able to do so?
‘Usually they run a mile,’ she says, ‘when they discover I’ve got a kid.’
‘Not me,’ he says. ‘I’ve had practice.’
Eight
The house was a hiring. There was something quaint about the term ‘hiring’. It sounded as though you might find it in a Thomas Hardy novel. Sixteenth of June Street. What had happened in Cyprus on 16 June that merited immortalization in the naming of a long, straight suburban street lined with new concrete bungalows? Dee never found out. It was the date of the Orthodox Feast of the Holy Spirit. Geoffrey told her that. Perhaps that was it.
Her weekends were circumscribed – Saturday meant a trip to the beach with a picnic; Sunday meant the garrison church, and afterwards lunch in the Club – but every weekday morning a car came to take Edward to work and Paula to the primary school, and Dee was left alone with the maid. Voula was a young girl of impossible shyness and no English. Dee experimented with Greek phrases. The girl laughed. After some days and much misunderstanding, Dee discovered that her real name was Paraskevi, Friday. ‘Is there really a name Friday?’ It seemed absurd, but the girl nodded, giggling with embarrassment. Girl Friday, Dee christened her. It seemed a fitting name.
Like a female Crusoe examining jetsam on the beach, Dee scoured the previous day’s editions of The Times and the Daily Telegraph for news of home. She wrote letters to Tom, to her parents, to friends back in Sheffield, and waited hungrily for their replies. Only after a while, cautiously, sniffing the air and listening for sounds, did she begin to explore the world in which she found herself marooned.
At the back of the house there was a wide open space of rough grass where goats and sheep grazed. On the far side of this area a small shanty town of shacks and lean-tos had been erected. There were people there, ragged children playing in the dust. Tsigani, Voula told her, screwing up her face in disgust, gypsies. Dee hadn’t expected gypsies. These were nothing like the gypsies she knew from Britain. They were something exotic and oriental. She watched them, and felt that she was standing on the shoreline, looking across to another world entirely, somewhere that had no point of contact with her own. Where had these people come from and where were they going? And more than that, what would happen to her if she went over to them? BRITISH OFFICER’S WIFE KIDNAPPED BY GYPSIES. What a headline that would make! The imagining of it gave her a curious thrill, something deep and organic. She imagined a gypsy man, like something she had read about in a story by D. H. Lawrence: dark and dirty, with flashing eyes and a lean, hairless body, coming into the caravan where she lay waiting, his figure blocking the light from the door as he loomed over her. Except there were no caravans here, and when she did finally get a sight of one of the adults he was ragged and dirty all right, but bowed and ill-shaven and repulsive, more like someone you might see on a city street back home, mumbling along the pavement, sodden with meths.
The other side of the house was different: here there was a deserted suburban street, roughly made of concrete and rock, edged with weeds. Tentatively, taking Paula with her for support, she ventured down as far as a small grocery shop that advertised Keo beer and Kean orange juice. There were boxes of unfamiliar vegetables outside on the pavement – purple aubergines and sweet peppers that looked as if they were made of red and yellow plastic – and, in the shadowy interior, tins of things that you did not find in England: hummus and tahina and taramasalata. Flat loaves of pitta lay in a glass-fronted cabinet, like religious offerings. There was the smell of
cumin and fennel.
In this shop they were greeted with surprising ceremony. A chair was put out for her. Orange juice was brought for Paula and thick, black coffee for Dee, along with a glass of water. Glyki, she learned: sweet. Efharistó: thank you. The owner – his name was Demetris – beamed at them. Dee only had to ask – parakaló: please – and things were brought, and packed into a brown paper bag. The youngest child would be dispatched with her to carry the purchases home, and she learned to give him a piastre tip, but learned also to keep it secret, for his father would have been cross. She discovered his birthday and bought him a small present, a plastic aeroplane. His name was Evangelos, which seemed too much for a young child to bear.
‘How d’you get on today?’ Edward would ask when he got back in the evening. If she had been out with some of the wives – perhaps Binty had picked her up to take her to a coffee morning or swimming at Lady’s Mile – then she would tell him all; but if she had spent the day alone then she would say little, because somehow it was her experience and no one else’s. Edward spent the day in the company of his colleagues in the offices of the Headquarters up on the cliffs at Episkopi. He lunched in the mess and talked and laughed and drank with his own kind, immersed in a world that she visited almost like a foreigner whenever there was a party at someone’s house or a ladies’ night at the mess. It was on occasions like that, with the men decked out in mess kit, their chests gleaming with the medals they had won in Italy or the desert or Burma, that she wondered about Damien Braudel.
She first met Geoffrey Crozier at a party given by Binty and Douglas. He was rather older than Edward, a short, dapper man with Brylcreemed hair and a toothbrush moustache. ‘Crozier, as in bishop,’ he said, shaking her hand solemnly. There was an incongruous London edge to his voice, half-breathed aitches, glottal stops. He was a civilian among the military, a banker of some kind, although exactly what he did was not clear.
‘Can I open an account with you?’ Dee asked him.
‘It’s not quite that kind of bank, I’m afraid. The Levant Investment Bank. We’re a merchant bank.’
She was not familiar with the term. It had a raffish sound to it, as though it dealt with argosies and camel trains, traded in silk and spices. Geoffrey had, so he said when she asked about his family, managed to keep his wife in England. ‘The problem with Guppy is that she can’t stand too great a contrast between her body temperature and the surrounding air …’
‘But that’s daft. She must have a temperature of ninety-eight-point-four like any human being. So Cyprus would be better for her than England.’
Geoffrey laughed. His laugh was infectious, as sharp as a costermonger’s. ‘Guppy’s blood’s as cold as a fish’s. That’s why she’s called Guppy.’ The name conjured up an overweight and slatternly woman, wearing carpet slippers perhaps.
‘What’s her real name?’
He looked puzzled. ‘D’you know, I forget? Let me see … Veronica, that’s it.’
‘So why “Guppy”?’
‘Oh, she’s always been Guppy. Ever since she was in nappies.’
They were out on the terrace at the back of the house, a married quarter in Berengaria village. Berengaria was a military enclave outside Limassol, an imitation of an English suburb drawn in strange, foreign colours and alive with animal sounds – crickets, tree frogs, the mournful cry of a scops owl – that you would never hear in England. He asked how she liked the island.
She confessed that she enjoyed the place. And she found the locals very friendly. ‘I’d expected … oh, I don’t know. Indifference, at least. Hostility, maybe. I find them very warm.’
He agreed. ‘The Cyps love to have someone be nice to them, that’s the truth. They’re not bad types really. Bit like the Irish – they want to be loved, but they do reserve the right to shoot you in the back if necessary.’
She laughed. It didn’t take long to discover that he was remarkably expert on arcane matters of Greece and the Greeks. He could converse easily with the locals in their own language and evoke smiles and laughter just as he did with the British. And there was the further, surprising fact – she discovered this the next time they met, when he came with her and Edward and Binty and Douglas up into the mountains for a picnic – that he was a poet.
They’d gone to Platres, a village high up among the pine trees, into a cool that you couldn’t find down on the coast. The road wound up through olive groves and vineyards, then higher and higher, lifting them out of the heat until the coast was a distant smudge of brown in the haze and the trees had turned from olive to pine, and there was the smell of resin on the air. They drove through the village and on up the road until there was a place they could pull off on to a forestry track. Geoffrey let the others get on with unpacking the cars while he stood looking out over the roofs of the village and the dome of the church. Far beyond, in the haze of distance, was the faint blue wash of the sea and the silver expanse of the Akrotiri salt lake. ‘Platres, where is Platres?’ he asked of no one in particular. ‘And this island, who knows it?’
Binty was spreading a rug on the ground, and finding plates and cutlery, putting out the food, getting things organized. ‘Geoffrey, what on earth are you going on about? For goodness’ sake shut up and do what you’re good at – open that bottle of wine.’
He did as he was told – ‘Ah! The old trout’s a soak!’ he cried – but Dee had understood that his words had been neither casual nor whimsical. When they were settled and they all had a glass of wine and the food was being passed round, she asked, ‘That was a quote, wasn’t it, that “who knows this island?” business?’
He smiled gratefully. ‘“The nightingales won’t let you sleep in Platres/Tearful bird on sea-kissed Cyprus.” Greek poet called Seferis. He was here a few years ago. Yiorgos Seferiades is his real name. He’s a diplomat, works for the Greek Foreign Office.’
‘I didn’t know you liked poetry, Geoffrey.’
He shook his head. ‘I don’t really. Often I loathe it. But it likes me. You know the kind of thing? Hangs round me like an unwelcome friend. The kid at school that no one gets on with, and I’m too damn kind to tell him to bugger off, and of course everyone judges me by him. Oh, Geoffrey, they say: he hangs around with old Poesy. Funny fella.’
‘Do you write it as well?’
‘I try. That’s a very different thing.’
Only later did she come across one of his pieces, published in the Times of Cyprus. She kept the cutting on her bedside table. She preferred poems that rhymed, of course, but she thought she understood what he meant. There was much about this island that she had not expected, either. And she fancied herself in the midst of her own particular Odyssey.
Swimming to Ithaca
When I first came ashore on Ithaca
I expected something different.
The grey olives, fingering the wind,
Were predictable enough.
The asphodel, with its cat’s piss smell,
Anticipated.
And of course I knew it would be hot and dry.
But when I first came ashore at Ithaca
It was Penelope who surprised me.
Her manner with the suitors,
And her impatience with my stories.
And the relationships she had been weaving
In my absence.
I had hoped to find an ally in Telemachus
But he just shrugged his shoulders
And asked where I had been all this time.
Expedience had become habit, that’s the trouble.
I’d been halfway round the world,
And no one cared to listen.
We become our absences.
One day she went into the town on her own. You weren’t supposed to do this. You were advised against being on your own, despite the truce that had been declared by EOKA.
‘I want a taxi,’ Dee said to the owner of the grocery shop.
‘My cousin,’ was his reply.
And so, half an ho
ur later, his cousin came with the taxi. The vehicle was a large, brash Opel Kapitan, a model that you didn’t find in Britain but you saw everywhere on the island – flashy and chrome-trimmed, like an American car. It wore a wide yellow stripe down one side, which signalled its status as a taxi, and scabs of pink undercoat paint all over it, which signalled its owner’s status as a driver of flair and masculinity. Cyprus racing colours, the British called the patches of undercoat it bore, or Cyprus blush. He laughed when she told him. The cousin was called Stavros. He was a portly man, with remarkably small feet for so large a body. He emerged from behind the steering wheel of the Opel like a dancer executing some intricate passage, a paso doble or something. Taking Dee’s hand he bowed over it as though it were the hand of the Queen of the Hellenes, or perhaps Penelope’s or even Aphrodite’s. ‘My lady,’ he breathed. ‘Please.’
Dee noticed that the nail on the little finger of his right hand was disproportionately long, nurtured and cultivated like a pet. She felt a tremor of disgust. He seemed entirely untrustworthy. Used to Yorkshire plainness, she was suspicious of anything that might be dismissed as flannel, and flannel Stavros certainly possessed. ‘More flannel than a haberdasher’s,’ her Aunt Vera was wont to say.
With great ceremony she was ushered into the back of the car and the door slammed shut. Again that fluid shuffle, and Stavros was behind the steering wheel, peering round with a smile of white and brown and gold. ‘Where my lady want to go?’
‘Just into town,’ she told him.
He looked pained at the idea, at the tragic waste of talent that this would involve. ‘But I take you anywhere. Anywhere, lady. Nicosia, you want Nicosia? I take you Nicosia. Shops? Bars? I take you. Kyrenia? I have cousin in Kyrenia sells thinks, good thinks, good price. I take you there.’