Swimming to Ithaca

by Simon Mawer

  She sat with him at the kitchen table beneath a circling fan, with Archbishop Makarios gazing benevolently down on them from above the cooker. Nicos’ aunt made coffee, while his grandmother nodded and grinned toothlessly from a chair in the corner. ‘Endaxi,’ she kept saying. ‘Endaxi.’ Two little girls came and gazed with wide eyes at the English lady sitting primly on her straight-backed chair.

  Where would Tom be now? Dee wondered. Somewhere over Europe. Impossible to imagine, suspended in the air in a steel tube. Alone.

  On the stove the coffee seethed and died, seethed and died. The thick black liquid was presented to the English lady along with a glass of water and a bowl of fruit in syrup. ‘Glyká,’ said the aunt. ‘Eat, eat. This red cherry, this orange. This one’ – she pointed to a small, glistening black slug – ‘this one vazanaki, this one’ – a small, dried turd, perhaps from a cat, perhaps from a small dog – ‘karydhi. Very good.’

  Dee regarded them with alarm.

  ‘Don’t know what you call them,’ Nicos admitted. ‘Thems are walnuts, I think. Not the sort of thing you get in England, eh?’

  She sipped and nibbled, and showed polite enthusiasm. Nicos seemed pleased by her approval. He talked to distract her. His interests were pop music and cinema. Music especially. ‘I used to go down the dance halls in Tottenham – the Mecca and the Royal. Y’know what I mean? Jive, and that. D’you know how to jive?’

  She didn’t. But sometimes people did it in the mess, at parties.

  What about rock ’n’ roll?

  Only what she’d seen on the Pathé News, at the cinema. That Bill Haley fellow.

  He laughed. ‘Bill Haley? He’s an old man. Past it. You should listen to Eddie Cochran and Buddy Holly and cats like that.’

  Cats?

  Again that laugh, a rough, derisive sound. And then, quite suddenly – it was as much a surprise to herself as it was to anyone – she was in tears. Sitting there on one of those wooden chairs with a rush seat, just like Van Gogh had in his room at Arles, and weeping. Tears running down her cheeks.

  ‘Po, po, po! ’ the aunt exclaimed, while Nicos crouched down and dabbed at her cheeks with his handkerchief. ‘What’s up?’ he asked. ‘Aren’t you feeling well?’

  ‘It’s all right.’ She shook her head. ‘Please don’t fuss.’

  But they did fuss, of course they fussed, the aunt running round the kitchen for whatever it was that cured tears, the old crone cackling in the corner, the little girls holding their faces. Nicos clapped his hands and said something that made the women disappear, and they were alone, just the two of them in the bare, comfortless kitchen. He brushed an errant strand of hair away from her face, stroked her cheek. He seemed to have metamorphosed into something new – the brother she had never had, perhaps. ‘It’s just Tom,’ she whispered. ‘I just thought of him, that’s all.’

  ‘He’s all right, Tom is. A big, tough lad.’

  ‘He’s just a child and he’s all on his own and he should be here with me.’

  ‘You’d be surprised how tough they are. Kids on their own, I mean. I should know. Hey, you want to use the bathroom, Mrs D? Wash and make up and stuff? Make yourself look all grownup again.’

  She managed a laugh. ‘I’m must seem awfully feeble, crying like this.’

  ‘What’s feeble about it? We’re not afraid of crying here. That’s one of the things we find difficult with the English. I told you, didn’t I? They don’t show their feelings. But you do and that’s all right. Now you go to the bathroom and put yourself to rights, and I’ll drive you home when you’re ready. OK?’

  ‘OK.’

  He touched her cheek again. His fingertips seemed surprisingly delicate, like a woman’s. ‘Come on, I’ll show you where.’

  Like everything else in this apartment, the bathroom was vast, as though it belonged to some institution, a boarding school or a clinic. There was a glass shelf with a bar of Lifebuoy soap and a tin of shaving cream and a shaving brush just like the ones her father used. Badger’s hair. Did Nicos use things like that? Or perhaps Stavros. She closed the door, thankful to be alone, fearful of stepping back outside into an alien world where people watched her and noted things and judged. A strained and flushed face stared back at her from the mirror. She ran some water and splashed her eyes, then patted her skin dry and tried to fix her make-up. The misery had subsided. She didn’t look too bad. Slightly aggressive now, making a face at herself in the glass. Tough and Yorkshire. Cautiously she opened the door and ventured out.

  ‘You look wonderful, Mrs D,’ Nicos exclaimed when she appeared at the kitchen door. The aunt was there beaming, and the two little girls, and the old grandmother, all of them waiting as though they had been set up as the chorus in some ghastly Greek comedy, to provide assurance and agreement. Kaló, they said. Kaló. Or something like that. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, and the old crone said ‘Po, po, po! ’ and the girls laughed and the aunt said that it didn’t matter, it was nothing, what can you expect when a mother says goodbye to her son on an aircraft, an aircraft of all things? Aeroplano. And then the door opened and Dee looked round, and Stavros of the large belly and small feet came in. He paused in surprise, seeing a British woman sitting there. ‘My lady!’ he exclaimed. ‘You are welcome beneath my roof. I hope they have looked after you.’

  ‘They’ve been wonderful,’ she said, and at that moment she felt an affection for them, a genuine, familial affection which was, a small part of her whispered, quite unwarranted.

  It was when she was going, when they were just about to get into the car, that the camera was produced. She stood awkwardly beside Nicos in front of the car, while his uncle manipulated shutter speed and aperture. ‘Photography is Greek word,’ he said proudly. ‘Photo-grapho. Light-write. That is what it mean.’

  The shutter clicked.

  Nine

  Thomas emerges from the tube on to the concourse of the mainline station, and there she is, standing beneath the departures board. A tide of passengers ebbs and flows past her but she remains still, a pale and steady flame emitting the faint smoke of a cigarette.

  ‘Hi,’ he calls.

  She turns. The flash of relief that lights her face is extinguished so rapidly that Thomas isn’t sure whether it was even there in the first place. ‘Oh, it’s you.’ She tosses her cigarette on the ground and treads on it. ‘The train’s in five minutes. I thought you were going to be late.’

  ‘I thought you’d given up smoking.’

  ‘Not when I’m nervous.’

  It’s an awkward moment. They don’t quite know how to do this. He takes her hands and leans forward to kiss her on the cheek, which is the first contact they have had since that hastily snatched kiss on the pavement outside Covent Garden tube station after the matinée of Cats. Overhead, the station names and train times whirr and clatter like dominoes.

  ‘How’s Emma?’

  ‘She’s fine. She likes going with her gran.’

  Gran. His mother used to assess the whole gamut of abbreviations: Grandmamma, Grandma, Granny – a dying fall of social acceptability. Gran was almost at the bottom. Holding hands for the first time and self-consciously, they set off for the platform.

  The train traipses eastwards out of the city. Stepney and West Ham give way to Barking and Romford, drab terraces and tower blocks making room for housing estates and factories and, finally, grey fields of clay. Kale sits opposite him with her legs drawn up under her and her body half turned so that she can look out at the Essex flatland. ‘When I was a kid we came to the seaside this way,’ she says.

  ‘Clacton?’

  ‘Frinton. My Mum said it has more class than Clacton.’ She smiles suddenly. An epiphany, when she smiles. ‘I should take Emms. She’d love it.’

  ‘We’ll do that then. Next time, when the weather’s decent. Frinton, with Emma.’

  ‘That’d be nice.’ And then the smile goes and she is looking out again and not saying much, just biting at the inside of her lip while passenger
s push past up the aisle. Two rows away a couple are bickering, the fracture lines of a relationship open to public view.

  ‘What’s up?’ Thomas asks.

  Kale turns. ‘Just thinking.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘Things.’ Her words might be evasive but her eyes have a remarkable candour. They catch his gaze and throw it back. Her pupils are wide, almost to the limits of her irises.

  ‘You aren’t having second thoughts, are you?’

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘About coming.’

  ‘It’s strange, that’s all. You know what I mean? Going with you.’

  ‘Why strange?’

  ‘Different.’

  ‘From what? From Steve?’

  ‘I don’t want to talk about him.’

  ‘And if I want to?’

  She shrugs and looks out of the window. ‘He’s my business.’

  ‘And me? Am I your business as well?’

  ‘Not really business, is it?’ She smiles fleetingly. ‘Contingency.’

  ‘Like being hit by a bus?’

  The smile flickers again. At him or with him? Her upper lip has a curve to it, a strange vulnerability, as though it is bending under pressure. It is almost painful to sit like this, opposite her. He wants to touch her, that’s the ridiculous thing, just touch her. He would be happy to kiss her as well of course, on the mouth, on the eyes, wherever her body is open to the world, wherever the devil can get in. If he kisses her on the mouth, he wonders, will he be able to feel the places she has nibbled, the small shreds of torn and clipped membrane on the inner surface of that lip? But just a touch of her hand would be enough.

  The train, the bickering of the couple near by, time itself, go on.

  From the railway station it is a short walk into town, down the main road that passes the public library, the cinema (closed), a video-rental shop, a pub and a DIY centre. There’s a scrawl of paint on one wall. NINJA, it says. ‘Just like Brixton,’ Kale remarks. But along the riverfront it isn’t a bit like Brixton, and even Kale admits as much. ‘Pretty,’ she judges it. She doesn’t hit the Ts – pri’y, she says. ‘Reelly pri’y.’ And it is pretty enough, the houses made of old red brick and fronted with white weatherboard. Quaint, certainly. There are bay windows with bric-à-brac for sale, there is the lounge bar of the Ship, an ice-cream parlour called Swallows and Amazons, a small restaurant advertising fresh crab, a shop selling disposable cameras and souvenirs, a tourist information kiosk. Over the sea wall the tide is out, leaving a glistening stretch of mud where sailing boats lie despondently on their sides, like beached whales. Gulls dip and swoop over them, laughing and jeering as though they are responsible for this practical joke. In the stream beyond the flats, a gleaming cabin cruiser escapes towards the sea.

  Kale laughs with delight. ‘It’s all right,’ she decides, as though there was the looming possibility that it might not be. They buy a pint of winkles at Shipton’s Shellfish and Kale remembers how you use a pin to uncurl the flesh out of the shell. She eats and laughs and squeezes his arm for a moment, then lifts herself up to kiss him on the cheek. There’s the faint scent of fish. ‘We should buy funny hats. And what about postcards?’ And then: ‘We should have brought Emms, shouldn’t we?’

  ‘Next time,’ Thomas agrees. ‘Next time.’

  The plan is to have a look over the house after lunch. Arrangements are vague. Are they going to stay the night? Is that understood? ‘For the weekend’, that was what they discussed on the phone, so of course it means they’ll stay the night. Saturday night and Sunday morning. So what are the contents of that bag that she has slung over her shoulder, the same one she brings to college? A change of underwear? A washbag? A clean T-shirt? Impossible to tell. The inscrutable arrangements of women.

  They have lunch in the lounge bar of the Ship – the Binnacle Bar, distinguished by a large, phallic binnacle that occupies pride of place beside the electronic pinball and the Exterminator console. The landlord greets Thomas by name and asks how it’s going, how his sister is, are they going to put the house on the market?, all that kind of thing. He eyes Kale curiously, trying to work out whether this is Thomas’ wife. But surely this one is too young. A niece? A girlfriend? ‘Just down for the day, are you, dear?’ he asks, trying to find some way to interrogate her. She smiles a flat smile that may be yes, may be no, probably is ‘Mind your own fucking business.’

  They take their drinks over to a far corner. ‘I don’t want much,’ she says, glancing at the menu. ‘Perhaps the Dover sole.’ She looks at him thoughtfully. ‘It used to be easy when you were a kid, didn’t it? You know, going out and that. But it gets more difficult as you get older.’

  ‘I suppose it does. But it needn’t be difficult. Just be happy.’

  ‘Happy?’ She considers the idea for a bit. Thomas feels daunted by her silences. ‘Your mum?’ she asks. ‘Was she a happy person?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘I’m not surprised. Not many people are.’

  ‘I am. Sometimes.’ He hesitates, on the edge of confession. ‘Now,’ he admits. ‘I’m happy now. With you. I’m completely and pathetically happy. There, I’ve said it.’ It’s a late-twentieth-century version of a confession of love. Love is spelled L-U-R-V-E and only happens in pop songs.

  Kale smiles. ‘That’s nice then.’

  After the meal they go out of the other door, on to the High Street. Thomas points across the road to the row of houses on the far side, red brick and weatherboard, the doors picked out in blue and yellow. ‘There it is. The yellow door.’

  Just as they are about to cross the street, someone calls out his name. He stops and turns. It’s the blinking woman, Janet What’s-her-name, advancing on them down the street. ‘Thomas!’ she’s calling. ‘Thomas!’

  ‘They all seem to know you here,’ Kale remarks.

  ‘Hardly anyone knows me.’

  Janet comes up to them with outstretched hands. For a moment it seems that an exchange of kisses is expected. ‘I haven’t seen you since the funeral. How have you been? Are you getting over it?’ Her blinking eyes pass quickly over Kale, down to her narrow feet, up to her face.

  ‘This isn’t …?’

  ‘Kale,’ Kale says, holding out a narrow hand. ‘Pleased to meet you.’

  ‘A friend,’ Thomas explains.

  ‘I knew it wasn’t your wife—’

  ‘Well, it wouldn’t be, would it? I mean, we’re not married any longer, are we? So she wouldn’t be my wife even if it was her, which it isn’t.’

  Janet smiles. ‘No, of course not. Dee showed me photos.’

  ‘What of? The divorce?’

  She blinks, as well she might. ‘The wedding. Gilda, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Was. Very much past tense.’

  ‘And your son? Philip, isn’t it?’

  Is she doing it deliberately? Thomas agrees that Phil’s name is, indeed, Philip, and he’s fine, just fine. And, yes, they are planning to put the house on the market, once they’ve sorted things out. And Janet tells them both how much she misses Dee. She was such a good friend. They had such good talks together; they got on so well.

  Is she, Thomas wonders, about to ask for something? It’s then that he decides to make an offer. Perhaps one could call it hush money. ‘Is there anything you would like, to remember her by?’

  Janet blushes. ‘Oh.’ She blinks, and considers. Her eyes seem to brim with tears. ‘Well, yes, maybe there is. There’s a shepherd and shepherdess. Meissen, she always said—’

  ‘Then you may have it.’

  ‘That’d be kind of you.’

  ‘It’ll save Paula and me arguing over it.’

  ‘How wonderful. Look, are you staying?’ She glances at Kale once again, as though assessing the relationship, trying to work out whether they fuck yet, or whether this is an affair at its very infancy, or worse, whether this young woman, a mere girl with a coarse London accent, is nothing more than a pick-up. ‘Why don’t you drop by? F
or a cup of tea or something? This afternoon? Later, if you like. A drink?’

  He shrugs, not finding it in him to refuse.

  ‘About six? You know where I live, don’t you?’

  He admits that he does. They watch her walk away. ‘How bloody awful,’ Thomas says.

  ‘Who is she?’

  ‘Some woman my mother befriended. Local potter or something.’

  Hand temporarily in hand – her fingers are cold to the touch – they cross the road to advance on number 37. He turns the key in the lock and pushes the front door open, on to the silence and shadows of the hallway. ‘Here we are then.’

  Inside, the air is still, almost as though the place is holding its breath and waiting. ‘Sort of spooky,’ Kale says. They step over a scattering of letters on the doormat. Bills, circulars, missives to the dead. Floorboards creak and flex under their feet. He opens the first door on to the gloom of the sitting room. Nothing has changed since he was last here. The armchairs are untouched, the Chesterfield sofa, the side tables, the odds and ends that cluttered up her life, all these things are unmoved. Only dust has settled. And memory. He draws the curtains to let daylight in. The room is made manifest by daylight.

  ‘Nice place,’ Kale says.

  He can hear his mother’s voice: ‘nice’ is small and precise. It’s a good word for distinction and discrimination. It is not a synonym for pleasant or attractive or good. ‘It’s all right. But there’s a lot of maintenance to do. The roof, the guttering, the bloody weatherboards.’