by Simon Mawer
‘You can’t make that sort of claim when a quarter of your population is Turkish.’
‘A mere eighteen per cent,’ the lawyer insisted. It was difficult to interpret his feelings. He spoke perfect English. His manner was balanced and reasonable, but there was an undercurrent of anger beneath his even tones, as though he knew that he was being teased, and, despite knowing about the British habit of teasing, had not learned the ability to shrug it off.
The mollifying words of the under-secretary tried to ease the conversation on to safer ground: ‘I see Cyprus as the crossroads of the Mediterranean. A melting pot. If the Cypriots seize the moment they can show us the way to the future. When I was in Lebanon—’
‘But it is not a melting pot,’ the lawyer pointed out. ‘In four hundred years of living together there has never been a single mixed marriage between Greek and Turk. Not a single one. There are no mulattos here.’
Geoffrey laughed. ‘What about Othello?’
‘Othello,’ the lawyer pointed out with a triumphant smile, ‘was an agent of an imperialist power.’
The dinner party broke up soon after that. The under-secretary had to drive back to Nicosia, and the lawyer and his wife liked to get to bed early. They made their goodbyes and thanks, and Geoffrey watched them out into the darkness of the street. ‘For God’s sake stay and have a nightcap,’ he pleaded when Edward and Dee made a move to follow.
So the three of them settled into the chairs in the sitting room, and there was a feeling of relief at the departure of the others and the possibility of relaxing. Brandy – ‘Armagnac, not bloody Cyprus gut-rot,’ Geoffrey said – gleamed like amber in their glasses. They talked – or rather, Geoffrey talked. His conversation was alternately funny and serious, revealing and guarded. He talked about his time in Greece, about how he had escaped from Piraeus aboard a leaking tramp steamer in 1940, and how they had been attacked by an Italian aircraft off Crete – ‘Bloody great monster with floats. Like Donald Duck flying’ – and how they had finally reached Alexandria. ‘Met up with Larry Durrell there,’ he said. ‘Just as he was shedding his first wife.’
‘What did you actually do in Egypt, Geoffrey?’ Edward asked. ‘Surprised we didn’t meet – Shepheard’s or somewhere. The Gizeh. What were you up to?’
The man laughed and waved an airy hand and poured more brandy. ‘This and that. You know the kind of thing. That’s where I met Guppy. And where I first read Cavafy.’
‘Who the hell’s Cavafy?’
Geoffrey made a face. ‘You don’t know Cavafy? He’s important, dear Edward, important. The poet laureate of the Levant. Which’ – he got up from his chair – ‘reminds me.’ He held up his hand. ‘Don’t you move. Just stay where you are. I won’t be a moment.’ He crossed the room, his progress slightly unsteady, as though he were still on the deck of the tramp steamer out of Piraeus. They heard his footsteps on the stairs, and then above their heads.
‘Probably not come down again,’ Edward suggested. ‘Probably flake out on his bed and wake up halfway through tomorrow morning.’
But Geoffrey did return, with a steadier step and a sly smile and in his hand a book that he presented solemnly to Dee. ‘With my compliments.’
‘Oh, my goodness!’ She turned it over delightedly, like a child with a surprise present. It had a plain blue cover and the title Aphrodite Died Here and Geoffrey’s name on the spine. She had never expected him to remember. Perhaps she had even imagined that he had been teasing her over his claim to have been published.
She opened the book to the title page and there was his handwriting – four lines of verse above a line of dedication:
Priceless is the measure of your glance
But worthless is my gaze;
Treasure are the words you spoke
But paltry is my praise.
She read the words with something like shock, remembering their conversation earlier. ‘How appropriate. Where do these lines come from?’
He smiled and tapped his forehead.
‘You made them up?’ It seemed astonishing. ‘I don’t know how to thank you,’ she said.
‘“Thank you” is quite enough.’
‘But can you spare it? I mean, you say it’s not in print any longer …’
‘I’ve got a whole warehouse full of them back home. And you’ll find a copy in every sixpenny tray outside every bookshop in the Charing Cross Road.’ He laughed. There didn’t seem to be any bitterness in the laugh, just genuine amusement.
‘Old Geoff?’ said Edward when they were undressing for bed that evening. ‘You’ve certainly made a conquest there.’ He was whispering, trying to keep his voice down because Marjorie had been babysitting and now she was in the spare room just next door. ‘I think the fellow’s a complete fraud.’
‘That’s just your snobbishness,’ Dee said sharply. ‘Because he’s got a cockney accent.’
‘South London, actually. And you’ve got a Sheffield one and I don’t say that about you.’ He was laughing at her. She had loved his laughter. The sublime laughter of a pilot, that’s what she had thought when they first met.
‘Who cares where he comes from? He’s a character, and you and your awful air force friends can’t abide characters. Particularly characters with talent. How many other people do you know who are published poets?’
‘Now you are being silly. We adore old Geoff. But you’ve got to admit he is a bit of a phoney. It wouldn’t surprise me if—’
‘If what?’
‘Oh … nothing.’ He climbed into bed and beckoned her to join him.
‘His poems are lovely—’
‘You haven’t read them.’
‘One of them, I have. And it’s wonderful. And now I’m going to read them all.’ She slipped in under the sheet. She was always shy of being naked beside him, even after years of marriage and two children.
‘And that house of his—’
‘Well there’s nothing phoney about that. It’s a beautiful place—’
‘Oh, I’m not denying it. Of course it’s beautiful. It just happens to be his, that’s all.’
‘His? You mean all that stuff about the businessman from Istanbul—’
‘Is precisely that: stuff and nonsense. Like so much of what he says.’
Suspicion bubbled up to the surface. ‘And Guppy?’
Edward shook his head. ‘I don’t believe Guppy even exists …’
Oval windows, and the cabin flooded with light. The sensation of flight is strong: the shrill scream of the engines, the cabin bucking in turbulence, pain in the ears. The solemn child seated beside one of the windows knows the technicalities, more or less. It has all been explained to him by his father, who knows these things: the cabin is pressurized – a new enough thing – to five thousand feet, which means that his ears have popped, and are popping still, and buzzing with a sound that isn’t the noise of the engines. This sound will remain with him for days after the aircraft has landed, giving a strange slant to his perception of things, as though the soundtrack of real life had been somehow corrupted.
Outside, beyond two layers of Perspex and a rime of ice crystals, is a brilliant landscape of cloud and sky and sunlight, each one a substance of the utmost solidity, so that one might imagine oneself climbing on those clouds, walking on that sky, sliding down that sunlight. The wing flexes and glitters in the cold, while air rages across its narrow aluminium desert, polishing the metal to a mirror. Noise from the engines, a shrill whistle, dominates the cabin, ousts thought. The propellers are arcs of rainbow colours. The engine pods have letters on them: RR in black, mourning the death of Henry Royce. He knows these things. He has a flypaper mind. Facts stick to it. The Honourable Charles Rolls died in an air crash in 1910; his partner, Sir Henry Royce, died in 1933. Ever since the latter’s death, the company, manufacturer of the finest cars and the finest aero engines in the world, has been in mourning.
‘Look at the pen,’ says his neighbour, demonstrating a fountain pen that is leaking
ink. ‘The low pressure.’
Tom thinks the man ever so clever, to understand this physical phenomenon. Later, he will think him bloody stupid for having brought a filled fountain pen along with him. He turns away to gaze through the window.
Far below, like crumbs of biscuit scattered across a blue plastic tablecloth, are islands. In the pocket in front of him he finds an airline map covered in red lines as though a malicious child has scribbled great diagonal slashes of red ink across the page. From the map he identifies the islands as the Cyclades. He wonders about the name. Something to do with cycling, circling. As though at his command the aircraft tilts and turns, drawing its upper wingtip in an arc across the sky, pointing the lower wing, like a dagger, at one of the islands.
It is afternoon. An entire day has been spent like this: take-off in the early morning from the airport outside London; a long haul above the clouds of Europe to Munich; then on to Athens, where a hot wind battered across the concrete as the passengers made their way to the transit lounge; and then up once more, with the sun westering and the brown islands sliding beneath the fuselage like marine animals on the seabed beneath a boat. Then a final land-fall, in the late afternoon, after a stretch of blue sea, the aircraft whining and pitching as it lets down over a dun-coloured plain between the mountains on the one hand and the mountains on the other and Tom’s ears popping as though bubbles are exploding inside his head. The machine shudders through the turbulence, with the engine note rising and falling, then thumps into the concrete, bounces hesitantly, as though uncertain for a moment whether to relinquish its hold on the air, then sets down finally and firmly, shuddering against the brakes and the reversed pitch of the propellers.
Through the window, concrete and barbed wire pass by, a low line of tattered buildings, and, in the distance, a wall of mountain rising up from the plain like a breaker curling in on a sandy shore. The colour is dun, dust, dried turd.
Eventually, outside concrete sheds, the aircraft comes to rest. The engine noise dies away and the passengers are left in defeating silence. They rise wearily from their seats and begin to sort their things. A brittle, blonde air hostess comes down the aisle and asks him if he has everything. ‘Your books? Don’t leave anything behind.’
No, he won’t. He’s boarding-school bred and his world is his possessions.
‘Come on, then.’
The two of them – an uneven alliance – advance up the aisle towards the door, gathering a small flotilla of other children as they go. And then there is the open door, and beyond it the heavy hand of heat, like a slap in the face. Tom hesitates on the edge of the stairs, looking down at the dusty concrete apron where soldiers stand with rifles at the port. Barbed wire like candyfloss. ‘Go on.’
The steps are steep, the handrail smooth and hot. There are people to direct the stream of passengers towards a line of buses. Like quarantined patients, like prisoners under guard, they are shut into one of the vehicles. Students from Athens University have appeared from an Olympic Airways flight and they join the passive London passengers, two fluids as immiscible as oil and water, the one shouting, calling, pushing and shoving, the other subdued by heat and tiredness and being British. The Lords of Empire. Tom sits where the hostess points, pushed against a window while the vehicle – crowded, noisy, not clean – moves off, staggering past the soldiers and through the barbed wire. There are people waving from behind the barricades, waving and shouting. Tom stares vacantly out of the grimy window. He watches, isolated in this maelstrom of Greek. Students crowd the aisles, pointing to their relatives on the street outside, laughing, often laughing, shouting, always shouting. Tom locks himself into his private room. He is trained to shut himself away, to find privacy in the midst of the crowd – in the lunch queue, in the muttering nightmare of the dormitory, at the bottom of a rugby scrum. His parents might be a thousand miles away for all he cares. Youths push and shove in the aisle. Tom absorbs sights and sounds and smells, the grime of the window, the dust and dirt beyond the glass, the people running along the street, cars jockeying for position, the police waving, the buildings with signs in Greek lettering.
‘Look.’ It is the man with the pen, tapping his shoulder from the seat behind and pointing. ‘Look. Your parents.’
Tom looks. There is a car in the traffic beside the bus, a green Vauxhall, with his father’s face framed in the window, looking up, grinning, waving. Tom raises his hand in salute.
Memory gives instants of remembering, like a night-time landscape lit by a summer storm. The scene at customs and immigration is glimpsed only on the edge of one of those lightning flashes: long benches with portly officials dressed in shabby suits, marking suitcases with chalk like schoolmasters marking prep. And then a barrier, and his parents, smiling and laughing and bending to hug him, and Paula hanging back in the face of someone who has done the impossible – flown thousands of miles all by himself.
Memory is neutral, it records without emotion. There was relief, presumably; love, certainly. But distant love, filial love, a love that has been compromised by absence. We become our absences.
Darkness descends over the landscape of memory, to lift once more at the hotel, the Ledra Palace, set about with Moorish arches, encircled with palm trees, its interior a lake of polished marble. A true palace. In the mirror of their room he glimpses his mother half-naked, her breasts as heavy as fruit, swaying as she bends. He has never seen her fully naked. Does she have pubic hair? He has heard about female pubic hair, but has never seen it: it is mere rumour.
There is nothing else, no memory of the meal that evening, no record of walking through the streets of the walled city. There is just a vague recollection of a car journey the next day, through a sere, alien landscape – a desert, complete with palm trees and disconsolate camels. And then up through the hills, a monastery capping a conical mountain on the left, the road winding through dusty villages where people stand and stare. There are slogans daubed in blue paint on some of the walls – ENH, ENOSIS. A dusty military convoy passes by, Land-Rovers with great metal stanchions nosing forward above their bonnets and ten-tonners with a soldier standing up through a hatch in the roof of each cab. Minarets point admonishing fingers towards the sky. Old men in baggy black breeches struggle with donkeys. The hills to the left disclose a triangle of turquoise sea. ‘Look,’ his mother says, pointing out of the window. ‘Olive trees.’ For Tom, olive is a colour not a tree. Or a character in a cartoon. His head whistles and pops. The whistling is like the sound of aero engines echoed in the brain. Speech is a distant thing, indulged in by adults. ‘My ears hurt.’
‘The pressure, old boy,’ his father advises him. ‘Hold your nose, close your mouth and blow gently.’ Later they reach the outskirts of the city, edge among the buildings and traffic, find the ragged street named for a date that seems to carry no significance – the 16th of June. Home, of a kind.
The panic summer, throbbing with cicadas and heat. They go to the beach. They go up into the mountains where the air is scented with pine resin and seeded with coolness, and from where the horizon is a blur of haze that may be the mountains of Anatolia. They go to Salamis and explore the ruins of the Roman city while the sun hammers down on their heads. They go to Famagusta and to Paphos. They go to Curium, on the south coast, where they creep past the solitary guard in his hut and, hidden from official eyes, scratch at the surface of the baked soil with a trowel, to discover there bones and shards of pottery and, gleaming like opal, fragments of ancient glass. Picking through the wreckage of two thousand years ago, Tom discovers the past. ‘I want to be an archaeologist,’ he confides to his mother.
‘Well, you’ll have to work very hard at school,’ she tells him.
Polo at Happy Valley, with dust rising around the thundering animals. It was as you might imagine a cavalry action: a milling confusion of men and horses, a rising cloud of dust, the punctuation of sudden charges of excitement. There were tents along the edge of the field and a regimental band played ‘Colonel
Bogey’. ‘Extraordinary performance,’ said Edward, who felt that the Air Force had a duty to laugh at the Army and its pretensions. ‘Anyone would have thought we were at Poona.’
They were at the bar with Binty and Douglas and others when one of the polo players came over. He was wearing jodhpurs and high boots with knee-guards. His shirt was dark with sweat and the face beneath his helmet was streaked with dust. Dee didn’t recognize him at first, even as he took his helmet off and wiped his hand on his jodhpurs and held it out to her. ‘I was wondering if I’d meet up with you here,’ he said. ‘Sorry, I’m in a bit of a muck sweat, but I couldn’t let you get away without saying hello. It’s Damien Braudel.’
She had expected to bump into him eventually, of course. In the circumscribed world of the military it was inevitable. But even so she felt a tremor of panic, a flush of embarrassment. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Damien, of course.’ It was a bit of a relief that Binty and Douglas were there to provide distraction, to engage him in conversation, to ask how he was and what he was doing and all that kind of thing. She introduced him to Edward.
‘Mrs Denham kept me out of harm’s way on the voyage out here,’ Damien said as the two men shook hands. ‘She plays an impressive game of deck tennis.’
‘Far cry from polo. Let me get you a beer. Looks as though you could use one.’
‘That’s very kind of you, sir.’ Edward went away to get the drinks. Damien glanced round.
‘Damn it, the next chukka’s about to start. We’re on a hiding to nothing against the Blues. They take the whole thing so damn seriously.’ He touched Dee’s wrist. ‘Look, I’m afraid I’ll have to rush. Apologize to your husband for me, will you? Are you going to be at the do at the mess this evening?’
‘I think so,’ Dee said.
‘Jolly good.’ He paused, grinning down at her. ‘You look bloody marvellous, Mrs Denham, do you know that? Prettiest girl here.’ Binty was laughing at something someone had said. The band parped and farted in the background. He lowered his voice. ‘I’d love to give you a kiss, but I don’t suppose that’d be a good idea.’