by Simon Mawer
*
‘You seem to get on well with that Braudel fellow,’ Edward remarked on the drive home. ‘Danced with him a lot.’
‘Once, just once.’
‘Three numbers.’
‘Were you counting?’
‘Not specially. You’re in danger of getting a reputation, you know?’
‘What on earth do you mean?’
‘As a flirt.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ She sat in the passenger seat, staring ahead through the windscreen. The beams from the headlights were like smudges of chalk across a grimy blackboard. There was a bit of drystone wall, roadside olive trees and, for a moment, a dead cat lying in the middle of the tarmac. ‘I was going to tell you that his wife’s over for the holidays. Maybe we should have them to dinner or something.’
‘So you can roll your eyes at him? What’s she like?’
‘Horsy.’
He laughed. ‘Looks horsy or sounds horsy?’
‘You know what I mean.’
‘Looks horsy, from what I saw. No wonder he keeps her hidden away in England and goes after you.’
‘He’s not hiding her away and he’s not going after me. You’re getting paranoid, Edward. They’ve made a choice, for the sake of the children. At least she’s doing that, refusing to send them away to boarding school.’
‘Is that a dig at me?’
‘It’s just a fact. Take it as you like.’
The phone rang. She knew it was him, even as she lifted the receiver. ‘Where are you?’ she asked.
‘In a bar somewhere in Limassol.’
‘Doing what?’
‘Just mooching around really. Is Edward there? Can I talk?’
‘He’s at work. It was lovely meeting Sarah at that do. Is she still here?’
‘She left last week. Can I see you?’
There was a pause, one of those awkward moments on the telephone which, in a face-to-face encounter, would have been filled with expression and gesture.
‘Dee, are you there?’
‘Yes, I’m still here.’
‘How about it?’
‘I was thinking of going down to Marjorie’s later. Perhaps I could drop by.’
‘Who the hell’s Marjorie?’
‘You must remember her from the Empire Bude.’
‘I don’t remember much from the Empire Bude except you.’
‘Don’t be silly. She runs a SSAFA canteen down near the Castle.’
‘Oh, I know. Where the men go for tea and sympathy. Well, that’s more or less where I am. Café Aphrodite, although Aphrodite herself seems a more likely candidate for Circus Fat Woman than Goddess of Love. And she could always double as the bearded lady if they were strapped for cash.’
‘I can find it.’
‘My dear thing, you can’t miss it.’
Nicos drove her. They went past the fire station and the hospital and the police headquarters. He glanced at her in the mirror, his eyes sliced out of the context of his face, devoid of expression. ‘Miss Marjorie’s canteen?’ he asked.
‘Actually, I’m going to a place on the seafront first – the Café Aphrodite or something.’
‘A bar?’
‘What’s wrong with that? I’m meeting a friend.’
The car edged its way through the narrow streets of the old town, round parked trucks and pedestrians. The minaret of a mosque could be seen rising like a missile above the roofs.
‘Not a good area,’ Nicos said. ‘Zig-Zag Street and that. Not the sort of place you should be going.’
‘It’s perfectly all right. We’ve been here many times.’
‘Over there’s the Turkish Quarter.’ He gestured towards the invisible boundary where dark figures watched from across the divide of religion and culture. ‘Bastards,’ he added.
‘What a stupid thing to say, from someone who has lived in England.’
‘What’s England got to do with it? You English don’t understand. Turks kill Greeks, you know that? For thousands of years they’ve been killing Greeks.’
‘And now the Greeks are killing the British,’ she said. ‘What’s the difference?’
‘Not now, they’re not. Not when Dighenis calls a truce.’
‘But they will be, when the truce is called off. And then you’ll be just as bad as the Turks.’
The road led past workshops where fires burned in the shadows and blacksmiths hammered at iron like Hephaestus at the forge. Hephaestus was the husband of Aphrodite – a poor crippled consort for the unfaithful goddess. Geoffrey had told her that. And then there was the massive bulwark of the Castle, with soldiers on guard outside and the Union Jack flying above. Beyond were the warehouses and the tiny harbour. The car turned along the waterfront, with its promenade of old, salt-corroded houses. There were one or two run-down hotels, the offices of a couple of shipping companies, a few cafés. At the Aphrodite tables and chairs spilled out on the pavement, but only one customer was sitting there. Nicos pulled in to the side of the road to let her out. ‘Shall I wait?’
‘No, don’t. Come and pick me up from Miss Marjorie’s canteen in an hour’s time.’
But he didn’t pull away from the kerb. As she walked towards the tables, she was conscious of his watching her from behind the reflected sky of the windscreen.
Damien rose from his chair. He was wearing a pale suit and his hat was on the chair next to him, almost as though he were saving a place for her. He bent to give her a discreet kiss on the cheek. ‘How are you? It seems ages since the party.’ He pulled the chair out for her to sit. ‘Is it too chilly out here? What’ll you have? How about a brandy sour? That’s what I’m drinking – it’s the only way I’ve discovered to make the local hooch palatable. Or you can have it with whisky, if you’d prefer.’
‘That’s fine.’
‘Whisky or brandy?’
‘Either.’
She sat at the table, wondering why she was here, why he had invited her and why she had accepted. You could disguise it as an innocent encounter if you wished, but she knew it for what it was: an assignation.
‘Brandy, then. Didn’t you pay that taxi off? He’s still waiting.’
‘He’s meant to pick me up at Marjorie’s, but he’s probably checking you out. Marjorie thinks he’s in love with me.’
Damien laughed. ‘A taxi driver? That’s a bit infra dig, isn’t it?’
‘It’s not something you can help.’
‘Don’t I know it. I’ll tell him his services are not needed.’
‘Let me,’ she said, but he’d risen from his chair and was walking away towards the taxi before she could stop him. She watched anxiously as he talked at the window of the Opel. After a few seconds the car drew away from the kerb and roared off down the seafront. When Damien came back he was laughing. ‘The fellow’s a London Teddy boy, for God’s sake. I thought he might knife me when I told him.’
‘What on earth did you say?’
‘I told him to bugger off, that’s what.’
‘Damien!’
‘Well, more or less. First I asked him why he was hanging around, and he told me that he wanted to make sure Mrs Denham was all right. And I said that I was an officer and a gentleman and besides that I was Mrs Denham’s favourite poodle, so he could push off. What is he, your bodyguard?’
‘I told you. He’s got a crush on me, poor soul.’
‘He’s not the only one.’
‘Don’t be silly. One’s enough. You shouldn’t have done that. It’s not fair, pulling rank on him.’
‘Rank? He’s not a bloody soldier, is he?’
‘Of course he’s not a bloody soldier. And don’t speak like that. He’s not a bloody anything, not a bloody Cyp, not a bloody wop. He’s just a taxi driver.’ She felt angry and bewildered, defensive about Nicos. That Damien could be so crass. There was an awkward pause.
‘Hey, I’ve bought a new car,’ he said. ‘Did I tell you?’
‘Of course you didn’t tell me.’
/> ‘Isabella, she’s called.’ He pointed. The vehicle was parked near by. Isabella wasn’t a nickname he’d given it, but the name of the model. It was a white convertible two-seater, a flashy roadster with a long bonnet and lots of chrome and the maker’s name – Borgward – in script along the front wing. ‘Isabella’ seemed to suit it; a blowsy, tart’s name, he suggested. ‘You wouldn’t believe that Germans could be so imaginative, would you?’
She laughed nervously, hoping that the encounter had been put back on an even keel. Their drinks came. ‘To us,’ he said, raising his glass.
‘Us?’
‘Why not?’ Damien looked at her. She sweated in the pale sunshine. He smiled and held her gaze and she felt the sweat trickle insidiously from her armpits and run down her flanks. She knew that it glistened in the valley between her breasts, and saw his eyes flicker down to see it. And suddenly he wasn’t chatting any longer, but was leaning slightly forward across the table and talking quietly to her and watching her closely for the slightest hint of evasion or pain or guilt or whatever it was. Love, he was talking of love. ‘From the moment I first set eyes on you – and you looked like death warmed up at the time, so it must be real.’ He had taken her hand, and held it, shaking it slightly as though to emphasize his words, the weight of them, the import.
‘Damien, you’re being daft.’
‘No I’m not.’
‘People might hear.’
‘There aren’t any people to hear. I almost said all this at your party but I didn’t quite have the guts, and I wanted to say it at that bloody do at the mess, but I couldn’t. And Sarah was there anyway, which made it difficult. But now I am saying it, so bloody well listen, hidden dreamer. I love you and I want to take you away from your husband and I want to divorce my wife. And I want to marry you and be with you for the rest of my life. There, I’ve said it. And you might tell me to piss off, but still I’ve said it and now I can die a happy man.’
She took her hand back carefully, in case he might crush it. Hers was light and fragile; his was strong, the fingers and the back brushed with hair, the nails cut short and square. And she wondered what that hand had done, where it had been. She saw it hooked around the trigger of some ugly weapon, a Lee-Enfield or whatever it was they used nowadays. A Bren gun, a Webley pistol, a Sterling. She saw it touching his wife’s body, going down over her belly and into the dense thicket of pale hair. She felt it touch her own body, inside her, just as she had imagined it that night on the Empire Bude. She shivered, as though he had actually done it, touched something at the quick of her. ‘I thought you were a Catholic,’ she said. ‘I thought Catholics couldn’t get divorced.’
‘They can get a civil divorce.’
‘It doesn’t sound very civil to me.’
‘Is that all you’ve got to say?’
‘It’s taken me aback, really. I could hardly have expected all this, could I?’
‘Well, what were you expecting? Deep in your cold, cold heart, you love me too. Don’t you?’
She felt a tremor inside her. It was something beyond control, something contingent, like a disease. ‘I don’t know what I think,’ she said. ‘I think you’re being daft, and I don’t think it would help if I were to be daft as well.’
‘But you’d like to be?’
‘I didn’t say that.’
Damien made a small exhalation of breath that may have been a sarcastic laugh, may have been an expression of pain. He sipped his drink and shifted in his chair to look out towards the sea where a ship was waiting in the roads, just as the Empire Bude had waited to disembark her passengers all that time ago. Further out a naval frigate was steaming past, its white ensign clipped by the breeze, its black guns fingering the air fore and aft. It was on patrol for smugglers, looking for the caiques that brought in arms and ammunition to EOKA, and Grivas’ insulin. ‘I’ve discussed it with Sarah,’ he said.
‘You’ve discussed what with Sarah?’
‘I told her. About my feeling for you.’
‘You’ve what?’
‘Oh, not by name, but in principle. Actually, I think she guessed. “Have I met her?” she asked. I admitted that she had. Briefly, I said, and she smiled and said, “Pretty little wifey.” I’m not sure whether it was a question or a statement.’
‘It sounds patronizing, whichever it was.’
‘She is patronizing. So what do we do about it?’
Dee shook her head. ‘Nothing. You’ve done enough as it is, merely by saying what you’ve said. You aren’t really going to abandon your family, are you? I certainly couldn’t love you if I thought you might. It wouldn’t be a lovable thing, would it, for me to abandon Tom or Paula, or you to abandon your daughters? It’s not the kind of thing either of us would do.’
‘So what is the kind of thing we do?’
‘Right now the kind of thing we do is, we have our drink and then I go on to Marjorie’s,’ she said quietly.
‘I’ll take you in the car.’
‘Don’t be silly. Marjorie’s is only just along the front.’
‘Let me take you for a spin.’
‘Damien, please.’
‘I need to be alone with you.’
She closed her eyes. ‘Damien, please,’ she repeated quietly. ‘Don’t you see how impossible it all is?’
Eleven
Kale has no history. She has a present, but no past. No father, no aunts, no uncles, no cousins. There was a man who lived with them for a while, when they were in Tottenham. ‘I called him Uncle, but he wasn’t. It’s always Uncle, isn’t it? Uncle Ronald. Then he pushed off and we were on our own, apart from my mum’s boyfriends. Quite a few of those,’ she adds with a small sting of irony. She has no past, no roots. ‘We never really belonged nowhere. Anywhere. Never belonged anywhere. I mean, London, yes. But what’s that mean these days? And we moved a lot – Walthamstow, Tottenham, a couple of years in Wood Green, and then south of the river. Mum’s not a Londoner herself, though. She was born in Birmingham. Came to London when she was sixteen. But when I ask her about family, well, she just sort of avoids the question. Know what I mean?’
He doesn’t, really. He and Paula have family – their mother’s relations in Yorkshire, cousins of his father in Hampshire. They don’t see them much, but they’re there to provide some kind of reference, some sense of being knitted into the warp and weft of Britain in the twentieth century. Is Kale’s type the future? Freedom from history. You just are. You have no reason and no context.
‘What about your father?’
She shrugs. ‘He pushed off when I was three. That’s what Mum says. I don’t remember.’ Her look seems to ambush him, a hard light of intelligence shining through the stunted education. ‘Family history’s a bit of a luxury, isn’t it?’
‘I suppose it is.’
Their disparate present lives barely overlap, like circles in a Venn diagram describing some logical but unsolved puzzle. How to increase the degree of intersection? How to pull her closer? And what other unperceived circles intersect with hers? There’s one marked ‘Steve’, and another with her mother’s name, and one with Emma’s, of course. But what others? He doesn’t know. He has slept with her and yet all he knows is the detail of her, the curves and interstices. She will be standing there beside him, wearing jeans and a scrap of T-shirt, and he knows all the things you can’t see – the curl of her strange, bifurcate toes, the precise shape of her kneecaps, the rough nest of her body hair, the hang of her breasts and the dark shadows in her axillae; all these things, but not her, the surface, but not the substance.
They have lunch together on the days when Kale is in college. Sometimes she is amused by him, sometimes evasive and distracted. When she is amused it makes him happy: it suggests a degree of intimacy, something shared. On the other occasions Thomas wonders whether she is thinking of the boyfriend.
‘Tell me about him.’
‘I don’t want to.’
‘Are you still with him?’
; ‘I told you, we’ve broken up. Shall we talk about something else?’
One Saturday they meet in Hyde Park and take Emma to the Natural History Museum. Emma holds their hands and swings between them as she did when they went to the theatre. ‘Stop it, Emms,’ her mother snaps. But Thomas loves this illusion of paternity, of being a family, possessing and being possessed. They pass through the great doors into the nave of the building, almost like entering a cathedral. Dinosaur skeletons, not saints, peer down at them from the shadows. Emma squints up at the monsters and asks, ‘Are we frightened, Mum?’ and Kale decides that no, we aren’t really frightened; but we are just a bit nervous.
‘What’s nervous?’
‘Nervous is being afraid without really knowing it.’
Thomas is afraid without knowing it. He’s afraid of loss. He’s afraid that she may decide, on a whim, that that’s it, it’s all over, whatever has barely started is now finished. Emma watches the dinosaurs, Kale watches Emma, he watches her, loving the sight of her, the articulate movements of her body, the set of her head, the thoughtful frown as she concentrates to read one of the information cards to her daughter.
After the museum they have a meal – Kale calls it ‘tea’ – at a hamburger place that is all red neon and yellow plastic flowers. ‘Why don’t you come back with us?’ Emma asks Thomas when the meal is over and it is time to go. He smiles on her as an ally in his covert, urgent battle.
‘Thomas has his own home,’ her mother explains.
‘Let’s go to his home, then.’
‘ ’Fraid we can’t, Emms. We got to get back.’ Go’ uh ge’ ba’ – a dance of glottal stops. What she has to get back for, Thomas doesn’t know. She answers the phone in some office for single mothers; she works part-time at the Brixton Library, cataloguing; she helps out in a café of some kind. Those little bits of others’ lives that intersect with hers. They walk together as far as the tube station and she gives him a quick, tantalizing kiss before vanishing with her daughter down into the bowels of the underground once more. Persephone.
Two days later he is standing at the window of his office high up in the Arts block when he catches sight of her far below on the concourse of the university: a tiny figure that is yet instantly recognizable. She is with a man. At least, the man is talking to her. From on high Thomas watches. They are talking, urgently, even argumentatively. He can tell by the gestures, the insistent pointing of the man’s finger, the set of her feet, the way she turns away and he grabs her by the arm and twists her back to face him. For a second he wonders whether there is going to be violence, and he will be forced to watch, helplessly, from seven storeys up. And then she has shaken herself free and walked towards the entrance of the building below his viewpoint. The man stands watching.