Swimming to Ithaca

by Simon Mawer

  ‘I don’t think so either.’

  He smiled. ‘Take it as read, then. See you this evening.’ And then he had gone, striding away across the hard-baked earth to where a groom was holding his pony.

  He looked very different that evening, wearing his scarlet mess kit, a peacock among the drearier RAF pigeons. But Edward seemed to get on well with him, which was a blessing, and Binty thought him ever so wonderful as he regaled them with stories of hunting EOKA in the mountains. ‘Some of them are bloody brave chaps, you know, whatever the mandarins at Government House say. Take Afxentiou, for example, holed up in his cave, entirely surrounded, never gave in. Stout fellow, if you ask me.’

  ‘But Afxentiou was a killer with a price on his head,’ Douglas protested. ‘Anyone will fight to the death if he’s facing the death penalty.’

  Damien smiled. ‘I don’t know. I’ve never been in that position.’

  Now that the battle in the hills had been won and lost, more or less, his battalion had been redeployed in the Limassol district. ‘Perhaps we’ll see something of each other?’ he suggested. He addressed the question to the group in general, but Dee knew that it was meant for her. She seemed to know him so much better than the mere week on board the Empire Bude merited. He’s rude and able, she thought, and I’m the hidden dreamer, and she smiled to herself at the silly nicknames. The fact was that she was absurdly happy to see him again, and frightened of the happiness.

  ‘Perhaps,’ she replied.

  ‘Have you heard about Seferis?’ Geoffrey asked. They were on their way to Bellapais, to see the abbey and the house of the poet Durrell, to see how beautiful the island could be when it put its mind to it. The road from Nicosia to the north coast led over Pentadaktylos, the ‘five-fingered’ mountain that had been created, so legend had it, by the hero Dighenis squeezing a lump of mud and throwing it to the ground. The range was a great petrified wave of rock rising out of the Mesoaria plain and hanging over the north coast. It was almost cool up there among the pines, three thousand feet above sea level, with the air coming in through the open window of the car. Tom and Paula were playing in the back, some game they had invented that involved spotting birds in the air and animals on the ground. It was a game that Tom always won.

  ‘Seferis?’ She felt close to Geoffrey, at one with him, delighted by both his laughter and his seriousness. Edward was away, on detachment in Jordan, and she was liberated by his absence, and guilty at the thought.

  ‘That poet fellow I spoke about – nightingales in Patres, and all that stuff. He’s just been appointed Greek Ambassador to Britain.’

  ‘How strange, for a poet to be an ambassador.’

  ‘Very Greek. The poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. Who said it?’

  She didn’t know, and he did. He was mocking her, making it like a test of some kind. When he caught her out it amused him. ‘Shelley, my love. Percy Bysshe.’

  ‘But will it make any difference whether the Ambassador’s a poet?’

  ‘It shows that the Greeks have civilized minds, even while they shoot British soldiers in the back.’

  It was difficult to decide whether he was joking. Geoffrey was a type she had never met before, or rather he wasn’t a type at all, but unique, and daring. He had this sympathy for the Greeks, and yet a loyalty to his own kind. He combined seriousness with reckless laughter.

  Up on the crest of the mountains they stopped to explore the ruins of Saint Hilarion Castle. Tom and Paula were running around the broken walls while Dee and Geoffrey clambered up the hillside after them. She stumbled on the path and he held her arm to steady her. The cicadas shrieked and whirred like dervishes; the children shouted and threw stones. They climbed up through the ruins and gained the edge of the precipice, where you could see down on to the north coast and the tiny scar of white limestone that was Kyrenia harbour.

  The two children stood on the brink, with the gulf, the great emptiness, the plunging hot air beneath them. ‘Be careful, Paula,’ Dee cried. ‘Tom, look after her!’

  ‘You could fly from here,’ Tom said thoughtfully.

  ‘You could fall,’ his mother called, in that tone that adults use for children – peremptory, reproving.

  ‘Would I die?’ Paula asked.

  ‘You would hurt yourself very much.’

  The road led down in steep curves to the coastal plain, to Bellapais village. Villagers watched curiously as the visitors drove into the tiny square in front of the abbey. The abbey was a ruin, like Fountains or Whitby – a far-flung outpost of the Gothic, Latin Church in this Levantine world of Islam and Orthodoxy. They wandered through the cloister. The place was an essay in desolation and corruption, the arches empty, the chambers vacant, the stones broken. This is what happens to outsiders here, Dee thought. Stone stairs led up on to the roof of the church, from where you could look out over the village. A Greek flag flew defiantly, and illegally, in the breeze. Behind the houses the slope rose up, climbing steeper and steeper through terraced vineyards and pine trees to cliffs and the rocky watershed high above.

  Geoffrey talked about how this landscape would change, how the whole place would change. ‘Invasion’ was the word he used.

  ‘By the Turks?’

  He shrugged. ‘If not by the Turks, by tourists. Hordes of bloody tourists. It’ll be destruction, whichever way you look at it. The barbarians will get here soon enough.’

  In the narrow alleyways of the village they peered at the doorway of the writer’s house, shuttered now. Two years earlier, as violence erupted in the island, Durrell had abandoned the place and decamped to Nicosia. A year later, after a spell as press officer to the government, he had abandoned the island altogether. ‘The trouble with Larry,’ Geoffrey said, ‘is that he’s really just one of those orientalists that the empire produces. He wants things to fit his own personal vision of the Greeks and the Mediterranean – a piece of folk art, really. All poetry and mythology and dreaming of Byzantium.’

  ‘And what’s your vision?’ she asked him.

  He laughed. The laughter was paradoxical: for the moment he was serious. ‘I have no vision. I just try and survive.’

  ‘But you write poetry.’

  ‘You mustn’t hold it against me.’

  In the café outside the abbey the children drank Coca-Cola while Geoffrey ordered a gin for himself and a beer for Dee. Their table was under a mulberry tree. There were no visitors around, no tourists, no one but the four of them and the old men of the village fiddling with their worry beads. A couple of them were playing backgammon, leaning over the board as though gloomily contemplating the future of mankind, slotting the pieces into place with the slickness of someone using an abacus.

  Tom and Paula drifted away. When they were out of earshot Dee turned to Geoffrey. ‘Tell me about Guppy,’ she said. And so he told her. Of her pure, distilled beauty, her loveliness that turned everyone’s head. And of the betrayals, the arguments, the exploitation and the unhappiness, the drunkenness and the deceit.

  ‘Yet you haven’t divorced.’

  ‘It doesn’t suit her to.’

  ‘And you accept that? Can’t you do something yourself?’

  He was silent. Perhaps she had strayed over the boundaries of what was acceptable. He sipped his gin and drew on his cigarette and smiled. ‘Perhaps it suits me too.’

  Afterwards they drove on down to the coast, to the town of Kyrenia. The alleyways of the little port were cut through by blades of sunlight. There were tin cans of geraniums on windowsills and beside doorsteps. Cats lay in the shade. The air smelled of hot stone and drains. In the harbour there were a few fishing boats moored against the quay, a squat fisherman mending his nets, a single shop selling trinkets. Geoffrey and Dee walked ahead, with the children following.

  For ever, for as long as the neurones and synapses in Tom’s brain survive, those figures walk round the harbour of Kyrenia. It is always midday, always midsummer. By some trick of memory, Paula vanishes and there are
only the two of them, his mother and Geoffrey, walking ahead along the curving mole that embraces the empty harbour. Tom is not there either, of course; he has no memory of himself – he is the camera, capturing these moments of sun and shadow, the rough bulk of the Castle with the Union Flag flying over it, the minaret of a mosque rising above the roofs, the fisherman mending his nets, toes gripping the netting to hold it tight against his grasp.

  Where is Tom’s father?

  There is a pure white sailing boat moored at the quay, a ketch or a schooner, its ratlines vibrating in the breeze. ‘Are they called ratlines because they’re always rattlin’,’ Geoffrey asks, ‘or are they called ratlines because rats run up them?’

  Tom’s mother laughs, and moves in a way that she never ordinarily does – a light, sudden skipping, her hips thrown, her skirt swirling. She catches at the man’s hand, holds it and lets it go. He has never seen her hold his father’s hand.

  Later – you can move through memory like you move through a dream, jumping without effort from place to place, from scene to scene – later they are in a cellar beneath Clito’s Bar, drinking commandaria; later, earlier, they are climbing the stairs to the dining room of the Harbour Club, and then laughing over lunch, talking with people, about people, making jokes, constructing rhymes, telling absurd stories. The windows are open and the room is wide and hot, circled by ceiling fans. White linen, white shirts, and his mother laughing. Has he ever seen her as happy as this?

  Summer dissolved, a draught of cooler air from the north spreading pockmarks of cloud across the even face of the sky. There were occasional showers of rain. Never had Dee imagined that rain could be so welcome, that she could lie in bed and hear this sound, like the sea, like wind in the trees, and feel reborn.

  She prepared Tom’s things for his return to England. In some intangible way, he seemed to offer protection from whatever it was that lurked beneath the hard, baked surface of this Levantine world where she lived now. He watched her and, she thought eagerly, loved her, and kept her rooted in the England from which he had come. She held him to her and willed him not to go.

  Edward was too busy to make the journey to the airport. There was an exercise on, some elaborate game they played – the Russians moving over the border into Iran, Syria invading Lebanon, one of those apocalyptic scenarios that they rehearsed over to themselves at Headquarters, in the hope, perhaps, that playing it would prevent it. So first thing in the morning, with Edward’s car waiting in the road outside, father and son said goodbye. They were both in uniform, the one in the grey-blue of the Air Force, the other in the navy shorts and knee-length socks and Aertex shirt of prep school. ‘Give all our love to Grandmamma and Grandpapa when you see them,’ Edward said.

  ‘All your love?’ asked Tom. ‘That means you won’t have any left.’

  ‘Well, lots of it anyway. Now I’m afraid I must rush, old chap.’

  They didn’t kiss, but instead shook hands like grown-ups do. Edward took Paula with him. She was going to Binty’s for the morning, the long drive to the airport judged too tiring and difficult for her. So it was just Dee and Tom who were left in the house, with Tom’s suitcases ready, waiting for the taxi.

  The driver was Stavros’ nephew. He was in his mid-twenties and wore crêpe-soled shoes like a Teddy boy’s. His hair was black and Brylcreemed and swept back in a quiff; modelled, Dee presumed, on that American film star, the one who had killed himself in a car crash. James Dean. He had an easygoing manner, as though the client relationship didn’t quite fit. Perhaps it didn’t, really: he had only come to Cyprus to help his uncle out with the driving. ‘Are you Greek?’ Tom asked him.

  ‘Course I’m Greek.’

  ‘You don’t sound Greek. What’s your name?’

  ‘It’s Nicos. But you can call me Nick, if you like.’ He had, he explained, lived in Enfield, in north London. ‘Norf London’ was how he said it.

  The little boy considered him thoughtfully. ‘Do you support EOKA?’

  ‘Tom!’ Dee cried. ‘That’s not the kind of question you should ask.’

  ‘But do you?’

  The driver didn’t answer directly. ‘One day,’ he said, ‘you’ll understand.’

  ‘Understand what? What’ll I understand?’

  ‘Tom!’

  But the driver only smiled. ‘It’s all right, ma’am. I’m used to it. I get it from my family all the time, only from the other direction. It’s just politics.’

  They had an armed guard with them, a military policeman in plain clothes. He sat in the front seat beside Nicos. His name was Cox. He had, so he said, another two months to finish his tour in this fleapit and thereby complete his National Service.

  ‘What are you going to do then?’ Dee asked.

  ‘Dunno, really. Go to college, maybe. Join the police force, maybe. Be a bloody picnic compared with this.’ He glanced suspiciously at the driver. ‘At least the natives will be on your side, know what I mean?’

  They passed army trucks on the road. In one village an army patrol was searching houses, lining up the inhabitants beside the road while the squaddies went through the houses.

  ‘Why do they do that kind of thing?’ Nicos asked plaintively.

  ‘Looking for EOKA, mate,’ Cox replied. ‘It’s your lot’s fault.’

  There was something of the atmosphere of a hospital about Nicosia Airport, a dirty, overcrowded hospital: the anonymity, the indifference, the same concern with one’s own affairs and lack of concern about others, the same isolation and sense of loss. Dee delivered Tom to an air hostess who wore the brittle smile of a nurse. She watched the pair go through the gates as one might watch someone being wheeled into the operating theatre. When the two of them were lost in the crowd beyond the barriers she returned to the car alone.

  Cox was leaning against the front wing of the vehicle talking to Nicos. When he saw her approaching he stubbed out a cigarette and stood to some kind of attention, as though he didn’t really know how to behave when he was out of uniform and dealing with a civilian. ‘Everything all right, ma’am?’

  Of course everything was all right. Nicos held the back door open for her, and she stood uncertainly for a moment, looking in at the empty seat. Suddenly everything was not all right. Her eyes stung. The dust, maybe. Out on the concrete, beyond the barbed wire and the airport buildings, an aircraft was manoeuvring for take-off, its engines rising in pitch to what seemed like a cry of anguish. It wasn’t a cry of anything, of course. It was mere noise with no meaning at all. But she made it mean something: it was her cry of anguish for the loss of her son. They stood and watched as the aircraft – a Viscount painted in the red and silver of British European Airways – turned at the head of the runway and held itself tensioned against the brakes. There was that pause, the rising pitch of the engines, and then its sudden movement down the runway, gathering pace, trading one element for another, rising up off the tarmac and into the air, climbing up into the blue sky, diminishing.

  Nicos bent towards her. ‘You OK, Mrs Denham?’ His hand was on her arm and there was a sudden and surprising dismantling of the barriers that lay between them. ‘Hey, we don’t want to spoil a pretty face. Here, you take this.’ He produced a white handkerchief from his pocket and handed it to her.

  She dabbed at her eyes, and then looked at the handkerchief and saw that it was black with mascara. ‘I’m awfully sorry. I—’

  ‘That’s quite all right. Part of the service.’

  She almost laughed despite the tears. ‘Phaedon Taxis at your command?’

  ‘That’s right. Difficult customers catered for. Specially pretty ones.’ The aircraft was small now, something distant, a crucifix in the sky, turning over the mountains and setting course for England.

  ‘There,’ Nicos said. ‘He’ll be OK, Mrs D, you mark my words. He’ll be OK.’ He put a protective hand on her head as she ducked into the car, almost as though he was delivering a benediction. ‘Mrs D,’ he asked when she had settled into the seat, ‘
why aren’t all Englishwomen like you?’

  She smiled up at him. ‘What on earth do you mean by that?’

  He frowned. ‘You feel. That’s Greek.’

  ‘All Englishwomen feel,’ she said. ‘They just don’t always show it. They think it’s a sign of weakness.’

  The journey back was uneventful. Cox slept, his head weaving from side to side with the motion of the car. Was he thus sleeping on duty, and did this constitute some heinous breach of military discipline? Dee felt dreadfully alone in the back seat, almost as though she were a mourner returning from a funeral. She tried to imagine Tom in the aircraft, flying high over Europe; but she had never flown herself and her imagination failed her: he was merely absent, and she was bereft.

  When they reached Limassol, they dropped Cox off at his camp, out in the wasted suburbs of the city, and then continued home. Sixteenth of June Street was deserted. There was something dispiriting about the rows of random concrete houses, the garish blooms of bougainvillaea, the dusty palm trees. Nicos brought the car to a halt outside the gate. ‘You all alone here, Mrs Denham?’

  ‘My husband doesn’t get back from work until late.’ It was like admitting to something shameful.

  ‘Well, how about you come back to our place for a coffee? Meet the family, see that Greek Cypriots aren’t all monsters.’

  ‘I never thought they were.’

  ‘That Cox fellow did. Couldn’t make me out, the fact that I speak English as good as him.’ He paused. ‘How about it? We’re only just round the corner.’

  There was something endearing about his attitude. Living in the circumscribed world of the military, where people knew each other’s ranks as though by instinct and each wife acquired a reflected status that mattered every bit as much as her husband’s, it was refreshing to discover this London lad who couldn’t give a damn. ‘Thank you very much,’ she said. ‘I’d like that.’

  They drove a few streets away to where a sign on one of the buildings proclaimed PHAEDON TAXIS. The family apartment was above the garages. It had wide, impersonal rooms and glistening marble floors. There were gilt mirrors on the wall, a sideboard like something from a church sacristy, ornate armchairs of exquisite discomfort. Ancestral faces gazed down from the walls like icons in a church – a grandfather who had been mayor of the city, a great-uncle who had worked for the Health Department in the 1920s, a cousin who was a bishop, a more remote ancestor who, sporting moustache and tarbush, had been in business during the Ottoman period. ‘All right, in’t it?’ said Nicos with pride. ‘Darn sight better than Enfield, I can tell you.’