Swimming to Ithaca

by Simon Mawer

  ‘He reminds me vaguely of someone I once knew. An old boyfriend.’ And then comprehension dawned. ‘How do you know he’s taken a shine to me, as you put it?’

  ‘Isn’t it true?’

  ‘Maybe it is, but how do you know?’

  He smiled. ‘We have our ways.’

  ‘We, Geoffrey? Who’s “we”? Have people been watching me, Geoffrey? Is that it?’

  ‘For your own sake,’ he said. ‘Lest you break your pellucid neck.’

  The shock was palpable, like a blow in the abdomen. She imagined men in fawn raincoats, with cheap cigarettes and battered trilby hats. Something out of Graham Greene or Eric Ambler. And then she thought of Marjorie, plump, motherly Marjorie, and wondered whether she was the secret watcher, the whisperer of secrets. ‘And now what are you suggesting?’ she demanded.

  He took a last drag on his cigarette and stubbed it out. ‘We thought you might get to know him better. Get him into your confidence. Win him over. You know the kind of thing?’

  ‘We thought, Geoffrey? Who is this “we”?’

  ‘People I work with occasionally. You could help us, if you were willing to play a part.’

  She should be angry. She should be telling him to get lost. But there was something ridiculous about the whole conversation, something implausible that just made her want to laugh. ‘Who do you think I am? Mata Hari?’

  ‘I think you are a tough and loyal Yorkshirewoman, actually. Someone who did her bit in the war and will do her bit now.’

  Paula called, ‘Mummy, I can’t find any more. I’ve looked, but there aren’t any.’

  ‘You must come in now, darling. It’s time to go.’

  Her daughter hesitated, standing in the shallows with the water creaming around her ankles.

  ‘If you don’t come in now, you’ll get cold.’

  ‘Think about it,’ Geoffrey said. ‘Just mull it over.’

  They were silent on the drive back. Dee was entirely bewildered by this conversation. She had thought of Geoffrey as a poet, a world-weary bank official, a bon viveur, a philhellene and classical scholar, and now he was presented to her in a startling new light. Spy? Secret agent? The very idea seemed nonsensical, the kind of idiocy that Geoffrey himself would have invented as a joke. Cloak and dagger. He had even – she recalled this with a small start of amusement – gone to the New Year’s Eve fancy-dress party in the mess at Episkopi wearing a cloak and brandishing a dagger. Everyone had laughed at his antics. Good old Geoffrey, they’d said. Not like a civilian at all. Quite one of us.

  ‘He’s just a young boy, Geoffrey,’ she said when they stopped outside the house. ‘He’s an innocent, an outsider dumped in this place just because he happens to have relatives here. I can’t believe he’ll have any knowledge that’ll be useful.’

  ‘Who’s a young boy?’ Paula asked.

  ‘Nobody you know,’ Dee told her. They waited while her daughter ran ahead of them up the path.

  ‘You’d be surprised what’s useful to us,’ Geoffrey said. ‘Often it’s the innocent ones who are the best sources.’ There was no pretence now. It was ‘we’ and ‘us’, not ‘they’ and ‘them’. Who was Geoffrey Crozier? For whom did he work? ‘Anyway, think it over. Give it some time and let me know. But please’ – he smiled, his old beaming smile – ‘please don’t say anything to anyone. Let’s keep everything secret, shall we? A covenant of salt.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘Is that the time? I really must be going.’ He touched her on the arm. ‘You’d only have to listen, Dee. Make him want to talk to you. Give him a shoulder to cry on.’

  ‘How do you know he needs to cry on anyone’s shoulder?’

  ‘Don’t all men?’

  She hesitated. ‘Do you, Geoffrey?’

  He seemed to think for a moment, as though he were lost for words. Geoffrey was never lost for words. Then he leaned forward and kissed her on the cheek. ‘More than most,’ he said, and turned back to the car.

  Dee watched him drive away. She watched the empty street long after his car had clattered out of sight. She sensed the whole island around her, Aphrodite’s island, Saint Paul’s and Saint Barnabas’ island, Umm Haram’s island, the island of hate and love, a fabric that could hold together for a while but would come apart sooner or later. She thought of EOKA fighters holed up in the mountains and hidden in the villages and towns; and British soldiers stalking them through the forests and the alleyways. She thought of Damien, and she thought of Nicos, each of them woven into this fabric for no particular reason other than the workings of spiteful chance. The noise of thought sounded in her head like a dozen voices all talking to her at once: Edward, Paula with her trusting innocence, and strange, remote Tom, who came into the family during the holidays with his pedantic manner and thoughtful way of looking at adults, as though he were storing things away in his mind like a miser with a cache of coins. Children had been all she had ever wanted, motherhood all she had ever aspired to; and now there were other things.

  The taxi threaded its way through the traffic by the bus station, behind donkey carts and ramshackle buses and battered cars. Nowadays taking a taxi wasn’t a luxury, it was a necessity – you were advised against taking public transport and going out alone. A taxi was the only solution.

  She watched the back of Nicos’ head as he drove – the oiled hair, the careful sculpting. ‘Duck’s tail’ was what they called the style; ‘duck’s arse’, the soldiers said. Sometimes his eyes would catch hers in the rear-view mirror and hold her gaze, for a fraction longer than one might expect. What was he thinking? Marjorie had said that he was soft on her, and warned her off; Geoffrey wanted her to exploit that very weakness and draw him closer to her, give him a shoulder to cry on, or a lap to lie in, or whatever it might be. What, she wondered, did he want?

  The vehicle came to a halt. ‘Something up ahead,’ Nicos said. There were cars and trucks and people milling around. An army Land-Rover drove past and then a ten-tonner, loaded with soldiers. With the windows down you could hear a distant noise, like an insensate sea sound, roaring and crashing. Along the street shopkeepers were slamming down their shutters.

  ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘Demonstration.’ Nicos looked round to see if he could turn the car, but they were pinned in the traffic. There was a bus directly behind them, its driver craning to see. ‘We’ll just have to sit it out,’ he said. ‘Best stay in the car.’

  Youths ran past, like kids running out of school, darting and jumping, laughing and shouting. Some carried banners, crudely painted. There were English words: FOOT NO, HARDING YES! and the single word TAXIM. People pressed around them. There was the sudden smash of breaking glass from the bus. One of the youths was throwing stones.

  ‘Who is it? What sort of demonstration?’

  ‘Turks,’ Nicos said. The very name ‘Turk’ carried with it a threat. It went with ‘Hun’ and ‘Vandal’ and bore in its sound the sharp plosives of violence. Dee felt panic welling up. Turks. Someone hammered on the roof, a great concussion battering on her head, like thunder discharged from a dark cloud.

  ‘Hey!’

  Was it Nicos who shouted? The car rocked like a boat in a storm. He twisted round and leaned over the seat and grabbed her hand. ‘You’re all right,’ he said. ‘I’ll look after you.’ People were all around the car now, a great scrum of people, dark faces staring in at the windows. A woman screamed, and then an amplified voice called over the hubbub in words that were Greek or Turkish, Dee couldn’t tell which. Then the crowd had gone, like a squall passing by, and there was a kind of stillness.

  ‘You all right, Mrs D?’ Nicos released her hand. It was sore where he had grabbed it, but his grasp had been a comfort, as though just by holding her he might have protected her in some way. It was difficult to read his look – his expression was pinched and pale, perhaps with fear, perhaps with anger. ‘You OK?’ he asked.

  ‘More or less. Where are the police?’

  His laugh was laden with sarcasm. ‘The T
urks are the police, Mrs D.’

  ‘Can’t we get moving? Can’t we get out of here?’

  ‘It’s all blocked.’

  Now there were soldiers coming past, wearing helmets and carrying shields made of chicken wire. They had pickaxe handles in their hands. A group of them wore gas masks. These looked inhuman, like amphibians of some kind, frogs thrown down from the sky by the passing storm. But they were only the lads who visited Marjorie’s canteen, the youths from Birmingham or Manchester or Liverpool, National Servicemen measuring out their time in the colonies.

  Then she saw Damien. He was walking along beside an army Land-Rover following the soldiers. There was a sergeant in the vehicle and a corporal driver at the wheel, but Damien was walking. He was in uniform and wearing a beret. At his waist was a webbing pistol holster and tucked beneath his right arm was an officer’s cane – what they called a swagger stick. But he was not swaggering. He was walking briskly, as though to an appointment, looking around him with interest, talking to the sergeant occasionally. In the back of the Land-Rover was a signaller with a radio. The whip aerial swayed above the vehicle like the antenna of a cockroach.

  She wound down the window. ‘Damien!’ she cried. And then, an instinctive sense of propriety taking over: ‘Major Braudel!’

  He turned, frowning.

  ‘Over here!’ she called.

  He said something to the sergeant, then hurried across the street. There was that brisk, military manner, the slick transfer of his cane from right arm to left, the snapping of a salute. It seemed comical to be saluted, especially by him. He leaned in at the window. ‘Dee, what the hell are you doing in the middle of all this?’

  ‘I was at Marjorie’s.’

  ‘Didn’t you know there was going to be some trouble? Do you need help? Are you OK?’ He noticed the driver and laughed. ‘Can’t the Teddy boy get you home safely?’

  Dee felt angry and defensive. ‘He’s been marvellous.’

  ‘I can look after Mrs D all right,’ Nicos said.

  Damien seemed amused. ‘Jolly good fellow. Look, I’m afraid I can’t stay chatting like this. I’ll try and send someone round to see that you’re safely home. OK?’

  He smiled, and touched his beret in a mockery of a salute. She noticed the cap badge, a bugle-horn hanging from ribbons, like a toy. ‘Must go,’ he said. And then he had returned to the Land-Rover and was talking to the sergeant again.

  Nicos began to manoeuvre the car, screwing round to look out of the back window. The engine roared. He spun the wheel, jerked the car back and forth in the narrow street, and suddenly they were free of the jam and going back the way they had come. ‘This ought to get us out of here,’ he said, turning down a side street. And sure enough they had cleared the traffic and were driving through narrow back streets, and then the empty suburbs, the deserts of waste ground and building sites that formed a shifting hinterland around the core of the city. Nicos caught her eye and grinned. She began to recognize landmarks – the fire station, the police barracks, and then Demetris’ corner shop and the sign saying 16TH OF JUNE STREET.

  The road was deserted. No inhabitant in any garden, no customer in Demetris’ shop, no one sitting in the cars parked against the kerb. In the silent suburban street only lizards moved. The riot, demonstration, whatever it was, seemed to have taken place in another world.

  ‘Here we are, Mrs D. Home sweet home. Did you think we wouldn’t never make it?’ Fink, he said.

  ‘You did very well, Nicos.’ She felt she should make up for Damien’s mockery. ‘Why don’t you come in for a cup of tea or something, after all that excitement?’

  ‘That’s real decent of you, Mrs D. Real nice.’ He leaped out to hold the door open for her. ‘If I can just make a phone call. Tell ’em where I am.’

  ‘Of course.’

  She led him inside – ‘There’s the phone’ – and went into the kitchen. She could hear him dialling and then talking rapidly in Greek. Foreign, staccato sounds, surprisingly alien. Not like French or Italian, where you could pick out words even if you couldn’t speak the language. There was something disconcerting about having him here in the house. No longer a youth; an adult, male, taller than her and stronger.

  A moment later he appeared at the kitchen door. There was that glance of amusement, that uncertain reflection of Charteris, just as soon vanished as noticed. She put the kettle on. ‘Make yourself at home. Do you want tea or coffee? It’s only Nescafé, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Nescaff’s fine.’

  ‘So what’s going to happen now?’ she asked as she bent to get the cups out of the cupboard. She sensed him eyeing her. She felt disturbingly vulnerable, and yet the sensation was not unpleasant. It was like someone stroking the palm of her hand, evoking a shiver of delight.

  ‘Happen?’

  ‘In Limassol. Now the Turks have had their riot, what’s EOKA going to do?’

  ‘Why do you ask me about EOKA, Mrs D?’

  She turned. ‘Don’t you know? Doesn’t every Greek Cypriot know what’s going to happen? EOKA’s like an endemic disease, isn’t it? Everyone’s infected.’

  He watched her, puzzled. ‘What’s endemic mean?’

  ‘It’s Greek, so you ought to know. And you’re evading the question.’

  ‘Well, what do you want me to say?’

  ‘The truth. About how you feel.’

  ‘There’s a truth for yourself and a truth for others, isn’t there?’

  ‘Is there? What’s that supposed to mean? You say one thing to one person and another thing to someone else?’

  ‘More or less. You smile and say polite things to the British, but inside you want EOKA to win because at least it’s Greek. At least it’s us, rather than a bunch of snotty-nosed toffs from Eton or wherever.’

  ‘And that’s what you do with me, say polite things to my face while thinking something else?’ The kettle came to the boil. She spooned the brown dust, poured water, stirred. To her surprise her hands were shaking. Maybe it was the aftershock of the demonstration. Maybe it was this conversation with Nicos, quite unlike any they had had before.

  ‘Why do you want to know what I think, anyway?’ Nicos asked.

  ‘Because I like you and I want to understand you. And EOKA. I want to understand EOKA. No one else seems to, none of the people I meet.’ She put the cup of coffee on the table. The question of EOKA lay between them, dangerous and ugly like a weapon – like the Sterling submachine gun that had lain on the front seat of the car taking her and Tom to the airport. ‘You don’t have to say anything if you don’t want to. This isn’t a court of law. But you can’t pretend it doesn’t matter.’

  ‘What if I did say what I think? Where would it get me?’

  ‘I’d listen.’

  ‘Fat lot of good that’d do. You British can never understand.’ He sipped his coffee, blew across the surface to cool it. ‘Sorry,’ he said, and suddenly she was reminded of Charteris again: the same sharp anger, the same wry apology. And a sheepish grin. ‘I shouldn’t have said that. You’re different.’

  She laughed. ‘Am I? I hope I am.’ She offered him a cigarette – you couldn’t get Players on the open market any longer, not since the EOKA ban on British goods – and he accepted eagerly, cocking his head on one side as he lit it. It was a practised gesture that smacked of James Dean or Frank Sinatra, one of those Americans he idolized. ‘So tell me. Tell me what you think.’

  He drew in the smoke and then let it out in a thin stream, watching her all the time. ‘OK. I believe in an idea, see? The idea’s called democracy and it means rule by the people and it was invented by the Greeks two and a half thousand years ago. And ever since then the Greek people of Cyprus have been denied it – by the Romans, by the Turks and now by the British. Now I believe it’s time for us to take it back, and unite with our brothers and sisters in Greece itself. OK? When I was in Enfield I used to get into trouble – you know, picking fights, that kind of stuff. About nothing. Just for the sake of it. Bloo
dy silly when you think about it. But here …’ he hesitated, smiled nervously, ‘… well here I reckon there’s something worth getting into a fight over.’

  ‘Against us?’

  ‘It’s not against the British. We love the British, don’t you see that?’ His tone was urgent, willing her to believe him. ‘The British fought with us when the Germans came. They were on our side. And they did the same when we were fighting for freedom from the Turks. The British are our friends. Here in Cyprus, we’re not fighting against the British. Believe me, Mrs D. What we are fighting is the people who are occupying our land.’ He looked embarrassed, as though aware he had transgressed some invisible barrier. ‘I’m sorry. I should’ve shut up.’

  ‘I asked you.’

  ‘Yeah, but it’s dangerous to say what you feel. Especially knowing what I know.’

  ‘What do you know?’

  He laughed – a sharp, ironic sound. ‘I know things they’d kill me for, if they knew I was talking to you like this.’

  ‘Don’t be silly, Nicos.’

  ‘I’m not being silly, either.’

  ‘So what do you know that’s so dangerous?’

  He looked up at her standing there at the sink. ‘I know that I’m in love with you,’ he said.

  She blushed. ‘Don’t be silly.’

  ‘You asked me and I’ve said it.’

  She turned away and looked out of the window on to the dusty garden. This foreign world, of sudden violence, of sun and heat and passion, disturbed her. It wasn’t fear she felt. She had mistaken it for fear at first, but now she knew it was something different – a sense of elation, a feeling of being alive more acutely because of the very closeness of death.

  The palm tree rattled in the breeze. A lizard darted along the windowsill. Behind her she heard the scrape of his chair being pushed back. She knew, of course. Without turning she could interpret the sounds and the things that were more than sound – a movement, a perception of presence, the faint exhalation of breath just behind her. When she turned he was there, standing over her, mere inches away.