by Simon Mawer
‘Wasn’t there a van in the car park? A car, wasn’t there a car? Fuck – there was a car.’ She runs towards the car park, and then stops and looks round desperately, not knowing what to do or where to go. The car park is empty. There are tyre marks in the gravel, and a chocolate bar wrapper blown against the base of the litter bin.
‘Emms! Emma!’ The name is pitched against the wind, but the little girl doesn’t answer. They run down to the lake, and pause there at the water’s edge and listen to the ducks chuckling quietly to themselves. It’s quite a good laugh really, a practical joke on the grand scale, with the adults panicking and running this way and that, calling and arguing and feeling the flood of irrationality that comes with fear; and the little girl squatting on the edge of the lake quite happily, talking to the ducks.
‘Emms! What the hell are you doing?’
Emma looks round. She is still wearing the tiara, although it’s a little lopsided now. ‘Listen to the ducks laughing.’
Kale runs to her and snatches her up into her arms. One of the little girl’s boots falls off. Kale is weeping, from relief, from misery, fear and despair overcome. ‘Emms, what the hell did you go off like that for? Why didn’t you tell Mummy? You mustn’t just go off on your own.’
Emma clings to her mother, grabs on to her like a monkey. ‘I hadn’t finished talking to the ducks.’
Kale is weeping and laughing at the same time, and burying her face in her daughter’s neck; and Thomas understands that he will never ever again be loved like that, never completely and convulsively, never with the whole being. He feels dispersed, separated from Kale in her happiness, lost among the sound of the trees in the wind, the swaying of the branches and the seething of the leaves.
Fourteen
There was the usual rigmarole of the airport, the coils of barbed wire, the soldiers in their sand-coloured uniform. She stood with Edward and Paula and watched a phalanx of passengers cross the concrete apron towards the customs shed. Over by the perimeter fence was the charred wreck of an airliner – a Handley-Page Hermes, destroyed months earlier by an EOKA bomb just minutes before it was due to take off for Britain, left now as a warning and a reproach.
Hermes was the Greek deity who conducted the souls of the dead to Hades. Tom knows this. He knows the type of aircraft; he knows the god. He watches and finds out, listens, reads, notes. Facts and ideas stick to his mind like flies to a flypaper. He doesn’t know what to make of this gift. It goes with school reports that accuse him of wasted talents, of much intelligence but no diligence. A diligence is a kind of horse-drawn carriage. Intelligence is the ability to unravel knowledge, but it is also the knowledge itself. The language coils around like a snake, words meaning things, things meaning words. As he walks across the concrete apron he hears a cry, far out on the edge of his awareness. ‘Tom!’ the voice cries. ‘Tom!’
The small figure turned and looked, and raised one hand in a salute. ‘There he is!’ She waved. ‘It’s Tom!’ She felt tears – of joy, of relief, of shame. ‘Tom! Tom!’
Permitted to wave, they were not permitted to touch. There were documents to present, suitcases to be examined by sweating customs officers, chalk marks to be made on suitcases, queues to be followed before his arrival at the gate where Turkish policemen stood guard. It was half an hour until he was there before them, small and serious, distant despite his proximity.
His mother’s soft pliancy, her smell of earth and spice. Orange blossom, perhaps. Jasmine, maybe. He isn’t sure. Smells and words go poorly together. And his father proffering a tough hand for him to shake. And Paula watching with hostile eyes from behind his mother’s ice-blue skirt. But for the moment his mother is everything, the all-consuming love, the love that dare not speak its name because there is no word for it.
‘Tom. Darling, darling Tom.’
‘My ears are popping.’
‘Your ears are always popping. You’ll get over it. Aren’t you happy to be home?’
‘Of course I am.’ But he looked uncertain about it. Was it home?
The road climbed upwards into the hills. The fields were painted in the spring colours of a million flowers. He deflected questions about school, about his friends, about his other world. There was this world and there was that world. Explorers of one rarely spoke about it to the inhabitants of the other. They passed through the villages, each with its mosque and its church, each with its donkeys and its curious villagers who turned and stared at passing cars. ZHT EOKA was daubed in blue on one of the walls. There were army trucks on the road, and Land-Rovers with steel bars sticking out from their bonnets like the claws of some giant raptor – a protection against wires strung across the road. Tom explained to Paula how this trap would work – heads spinning across the tarmac, blood spurting, vehicles plunging out of control. ‘Don’t be so gruesome,’ Dee protested.
‘But it’s true, Mummy. It’s true.’
‘It may be true but you don’t have to talk about it.’
And then the car breasted a rise in the road and they could see the sea for the first time, the blue of the Mediterranean, bluer by far than her dress. There was a field of poppies, red against the blue.
‘Oh, do look!’ she called out. ‘Can we stop? Edward, can’t we stop for a moment?’
‘Better if we keep going.’
‘Oh, for goodness’ sake!’
Reluctantly he slowed the car and pulled off the road. ‘This isn’t very sensible.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous. There’s no one around.’
‘You seem to think there’s no danger.’
‘I’m realistic, that’s all. And I know that most Cypriots wouldn’t hurt a fly.’
‘They kill birds happily enough, never mind flies.’
‘Don’t be so literal. You know what I mean.’
She flung the door open. There was a place where the rubble wall had fallen away. Hitching up her skirt, she negotiated the stones. ‘Come on, Tom, help Paula.’ They walked through the field holding her hands, Tom and Paula knee-deep in blood, her skirt sweeping the flowers. ‘Take a photo,’ she called. ‘Get the camera.’
They turned to pose, Persephone with her children among the spring flowers. ‘Do get a move on, Edward.’
She wished it were him. She wished it were Charteris. Tears stung her eyes. Edward stood at the breach in the wall, with his eye to the camera. ‘Smile,’ he called.
No one did.
A warm evening. The french windows were open on to the garden and you could hear the sound of crickets, a soft, patient trilling. The diners smoked and drank, and argued.
‘We’re on a bloody seesaw,’ Damien said. ‘We move one way – in favour of the Turks, say – and the Greeks are up in arms. We shift the other way and the Turks start complaining. One side demands partition and the other side refuses to countenance it.’ His voice was quiet and insistent. They listened to him carefully because they knew that he lived on the front line. He walked the streets with his soldiers. He confronted the youths of both sides face to face. ‘They need their heads banging together, that’s the truth of it. And I’m afraid that Foot isn’t the man to do it.’
‘Was Harding any better?’ Johnny Frindle asked. ‘When he was in charge we were fighting a military battle, but really this is a political issue. I mean, Britain doesn’t really want to be fighting either the Greeks or the Turks. We damn well ought to be concentrating on the Soviet Union. Mustn’t take our eye off the ball. That’s what we’re here for.’
Dee excused herself for a moment and went to check that the children were asleep. When she came back the debate was still going on, the bloody politics of Aphrodite’s island being pulled this way and that. ‘Keeping the Turks happy, that’s the problem,’ Edward was saying. ‘We’ve got to keep the Turks happy.’
She began to clear away the dishes. Damien stood to help her and she gestured that he should stay in his seat – ‘No, really, Damien’ – but he followed her into the kitchen just the same, carrying a coupl
e of plates. At the sink he brushed against her, his hand touching her arm. ‘Please,’ she said. Her tone was uncertain, hung between admonishment and entreaty.
‘I’ve got to see you alone,’ he said. ‘I can’t bear this.’
She could hear the loud expostulations of Douglas sounding through the closed door from the dining room – ‘These people don’t know what’s good for them,’ he was saying.
‘But we’ve got to do something.’
‘We can’t do anything.’
Out in the hall the telephone rang. The dining-room door opened and Edward came out. She felt Damien move away as Edward picked up the phone. The passage of time, seemingly halted for an instant, moved on.
Tom is lying in bed, asleep.
He’s not asleep, but he’s meant to be asleep.
He’s lying in bed, and when his mother comes in to check, he’s asleep, and when she doesn’t, he’s awake. Is this behaviour forbidden? Sort of. ‘Go to sleep’ is an injunction with a degree of compulsion behind it, as though you can induce sleep merely by willing it. But sleep just happens. You wait, and it happens. Or not. In the dormitory at school he lies awake for as long as he can because in the dormitory, after lights-out, he is free …
There are guests to dinner, and he’s listening to the laughter, to the murmur of conversation, to the rise and fall of words. Some phrases he can hear, some voices he can recognize. Douglas’, of course. Binty’s laughter. Others he doesn’t know.
Paula is next door, and she’s asleep. But then she’s younger and oblivious to the delights of eavesdropping. Sometimes when there are guests he creeps out of bed and goes to the dining-room door to listen. He’s a spy. Spies do these things. Spies watch and listen and note things down. Spies construct stories from the small hints that people drop.
He’s lying in bed awake. He can hear someone going to the kitchen. He recognizes his mother’s footsteps. Other steps follow. Then the telephone rings and there’s a burst of volume, and then the dining-room door closes and all he can hear is the rise and fall of his father’s voice on the telephone. The words are blurred by the intervening wall but you can sense things from the tone. Insistence. Shock. The undulations of concern and distress. Something has happened.
Sleep. He’s lying in bed asleep. Then he’s awake, and his father is talking on the telephone again, this time with a certain authority, as though he knows what he is doing. Talking to someone of a lesser rank. His words cut through the wall, cut through the door, cut through Tom’s sleep: ‘I want to get on the flight tomorrow. Supplementary crew. Yes, that’s right. My father has just died and I’ve got to get back to the UK.’
Tom is lying in bed, asleep.
Next morning his father has gone. ‘Grandpapa’s ill,’ his mother tells the two of them over breakfast. ‘Daddy’s had to go and help Grandmamma.’
‘Help her do what?’ Paula asks.
‘Help her look after Grandpapa, of course.’
He has never caught his mother out in a lie before. But perhaps she’s not telling a lie. Perhaps Grandpapa is ill. Perhaps he’s alive and dead at the same time. Perhaps two contradictory truths can coexist.
‘How would you like to go to Binty’s tomorrow? There are things I’ve got to do.’ She smiles brightly, as though to encourage them, as though this might help Grandpapa on the road to recovery or resurrection.
‘I don’t want to go to Binty’s,’ Paula says. ‘I want to be with you.’
‘You’ll be with Tom. Tom doesn’t mind going to Binty’s, does he?’
He doesn’t. Tom is hardened to dislocation.
The day vanishes from memory. Days can have that evanescent quality, like the colours in spring: there so vividly, just as soon bleached out by the summer sun. The next morning he wakes early and goes to his parents’ room where his mother is still in bed, half asleep. He climbs in beside her, into the warmth and the smell of familiarity and family, a smell that other homes and, presumably, other beds do not possess; a unique, territorial smell. He cuddles against her and feels the soft masses of her breasts through the cotton of her nightdress.
‘How is Grandpapa?’ he asks.
She considers the question and her answer for a few moments. ‘I’m afraid Grandpapa’s dead, darling,’ she tells him.
After careful thought he admits that he already knows.
‘You know?’
‘I heard Daddy talking on the phone.’
‘You’ve known all the time?’
‘Yes.’
She holds him close. ‘Don’t tell Paula yet, will you? It would upset her too much.’
He hasn’t the heart to tell her that Paula won’t care. Death is something that adults feel, not children. That is the thought that has been worrying him. Why can’t he feel any emotion over his grandfather’s death? That jovial, amiable man whom he knew well and loved. Why doesn’t he cry, as he suspects his mother has been doing? Why is he merely curious about what has happened? Not upset; curious. What’s it like, being dead? What’s it like being absent from everything and everyone? What do you become? You become your remembrance.
Binty looked at her quizzically. ‘Are you all right, darling?’ Dee smiled. ‘I’m fine.’ Walking on the edge of a precipice, she thought, thinking of flying.
‘Are you sure you don’t want to come with us? Have a talk, get things off your chest?’
‘I’d love to, but I can’t really desert Marjorie. She’s all on her own and what with the disturbances there are lots of customers these days. I’m sorry to dump you with the children.’
‘Oh, they’ll be all right. We’ll go for a swim first and then I’ll take them home. They’ll entertain each other. I’ll bring them back at about six, if that’s OK? How’s Edward getting on? Has he phoned?’
‘Yesterday. It’s not that easy getting through. I expect I’ll hear from him this evening. He seemed OK.’
She kissed the children and waved as they drove away, then went back inside to change. She put on the full-skirted frock, the one with blue and white stripes. It suited her. Edward always said so. And then she could only wait, washing the breakfast things – she had given Voula the day off – pottering around the house, tidying some of the children’s toys away. She felt a variety of emotions – anticipation, anxiety, a strange abstraction from reality, as though she were in a dream state of some kind, as though all the mundane things around her were abnormal, and the only reality was within her mind. She opened the french windows and went out into the garden. The air was laden with the perfumes of spring, the scent of jasmine almost overpowering in its intensity. She wandered along the dry paths. There was no grass. It wasn’t like England. Nothing was like England. Here, growing out of dry earth, were hibiscus and pomegranate and oleander, plants that she had never seen, barely even imagined, until she came out here. Oranges, of course, and myrtle and bougainvillaea. It was only two days ago that Tom had found another chameleon in one of the trees; or maybe the same one. How on earth could one tell? The animal had watched them impassively through the barrels of its armoured eyes, grasping its branch with slow thumbs and, when Tom picked it up – Paula had screamed – and moved it to another place, delicately changing its colour to suit its background. Dee had felt a curious affinity with the animal. One colour in Sheffield, another here; one for Edward, one for Damien, another for Tom and Paula, another for Nicos.
On one of the paths she discovered Paula’s tricycle. The children were always leaving their stuff outside. Lying beneath a hibiscus bush was a football that Tom had been given for his last birthday. She warned them that anyone could climb into the garden and take things, some child from the gypsy camp perhaps. It would be their own fault if their toys disappeared.
She was about to take the things in when she heard the car. The sound was distinctive, like a familiar voice. Trying not to hurry, she picked up the tricycle and strolled round to the front. The car was parked outside the gate, and there he was, climbing out. He smiled awkwardly, anxiety i
n his eyes. ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘You look great. That dress.’
She wondered how often she had worn it before that he might have seen. Her wardrobe wasn’t extensive. ‘It’s an old one.’
‘It’s lovely.’ He looked round, standing just outside the gate as though waiting to be asked in. ‘What about the kids?’
She showed him the trike. ‘Tidying up after them. They’ve gone swimming with Mrs Paxton. And Voula’s got the day off.’ Why did she tell him that? To make things clear? They stood looking at one another for a moment. ‘Do you want to come in for a moment? A cup of coffee or something?’
He opened the gate. ‘If that’s all right. I don’t want …’ But he never said what he didn’t want. From behind his back he produced a flower, a single cyclamen of intense magenta, and held it out to her. He blushed slightly. ‘Found it on the roadside, underneath some trees. Not exactly a bouquet of red roses, but it’s something.’
She accepted the flower with elaborate solemnity, as though this were a tradition in a strange country where she had never been before. That was how she felt: a traveller in a land whose customs she could only guess at. ‘It’s beautiful.’
He followed her up the steps to the front door. Inside was a kind of sanctuary, away from strangers’ eyes. She put the trike down and closed the door. ‘Come through. Make yourself comfortable. What would you like? Coffee? Shall I make a cup of coffee? Before we go?’
He followed her into the sitting room. There was a photograph of the children on a side table, Tom in his school uniform, Paula wearing a pretty frock with smocking across the front. She watched him pick it up. ‘Lovely kids,’ he said. ‘She’s a right terror, isn’t she?’
Dee laughed. ‘I’ll just put this in some water. Otherwise it’ll die.’