Swimming to Ithaca
Page 32
‘And then?’
‘You come to terms with it after a fashion. You get on with your life and make of it what you can. Which in my case wasn’t a great deal. A failed marriage, work of sorts – a bit of sculpting and pottery. I even taught for a few years at an art college. And then, some time after the break-up of my marriage, I decided to find out for myself. It was me who went looking for her.’
She pauses, as though to leave him space to speak. But he hasn’t anything to say. All those words have come to nothing.
‘I made enquiries – the local council, the birth records, forms to fill, interviews, pleading, pleading. It’s weird, distressing, like your own past is someone else’s secret and they’re not letting you in on it. And then, of course, if you do find out, you have to make contact indirectly in case the other person doesn’t want to know. You can’t plead, you can’t persuade. All you can do is ask a plain question, through a third party. “Do you want to meet me?” It’s like appealing to a jury and waiting for the verdict. Guilty or not guilty? Nothing in between. But she agreed to a meeting.’ Janet makes a sound. It might be a cough, might be the sound of choking. Tears have gathered in her eyes once more. ‘So here I am, Tom. Here I am.’
And it’s there again as she stares back at him, that familial likeness, the shadow of a past cast forward into the future. He shakes his head, searching for something coherent to say. ‘There were things she said. I thought … I don’t know what I thought, really. I had this idea she had betrayed my father. All those years ago in Cyprus.’
Janet smiles. ‘She never betrayed your father, Tom. Or you, or Paula. She betrayed me.’
The station is little more than a halt – a single platform with a small shelter and a single track coming to a single pair of buffers. The end of the line. He waits, looking down the rails, where they converge in the distance amidst trees and grass banks and the low grey sky. There is a single gantry with one of those old mechanical signals on it, the arm slanting upwards.
He waits.
A voice crackles out into the still air announcing, barely intelligibly, the arrival of the 12.55 train from Liverpool Street Station. Apparently as a result of the announcement, as though words can conjure up events, the train itself appears, at first no more than the idea of a train, a mere spot at the distant apex of perspective.
Thomas watches it grow larger. Of course, it’s only the illusion of perspective that makes it grow, just as the perspective of memory throws things into different proportion according to how you see them; and everything is larger in a child’s world.
And then the train rolls over some subtle boundary and it is no longer there in the distance, but here, present, a steel and aluminium tube sliding alongside the platform, groaning and grinding as the brakes go on, a sealed capsule painted and daubed, with windows and doors and lives inside, the present lives of however many people there are who have come out to the far reaches of estuarine Essex on an afternoon of one Friday in early summer.
The doors bang open. Passengers climb down on to the platform and look around in that uncertain way they have when they arrive at their destination.
He waits, watching for a slender, pale woman and her little girl.