Swimming to Ithaca (18 page)

‘Let me give you something in return,’ Janet suggests. Her eyes are bright, as though this is also a new and exciting idea. ‘Do I give you something each, or one for both?’

It’s a clever question, evoking a revealing hesitation, a glance between the two of them that Janet watches with bright attention. She is probing: despite the rushed voice, the anxious
blinking, the nervousness, she is probing the subtle matter of their relationship, and finding pressure points of discomfort.

‘I reckon one each would be far too generous,’ Kale says, which is as neutral a reply as anyone could give. It is she who chooses their present – a sinuous vase in sand and blue – and then Janet kisses both of them again and squeezes Thomas’ arm and wishes them well. Not ‘happiness’ – just ‘well’. The words are chosen with care. There are tears in her eyes once again as she stands at the door to her house and watches them walk away.

‘She’s on the edge,’ Kale remarks when they are out of earshot.

‘On the edge of what?’

‘You know what I mean. She’s damaged.’

‘Oh, come on. Just blinks a bit.’

‘And cries.’

‘She was fond of my mother, apparently.’

‘Sure she was. Notice her wrists?’

‘Not especially.’

‘Scarred. She’s tried to top herself sometime in the past. And if they’ve tried once, they usually succeed.’

‘What are you? Some kind of psychologist?’

‘I just know, that’s all.’

Except for the lights in the window of the pub and the accompanying noise that spills out on to the pavement, the town is shuttered and empty. Back in the house Kale puts the vase on a table in the sitting room. ‘It’s yours really,’ she remarks. ‘Nothing to do with me.’

‘It’s ours,’ Thomas says. ‘She gave it to the two of us.’

‘
We
don’t have anywhere to put it.’

Thomas prepares supper. There are eggs in the fridge and a bottle of wine, carefully placed there on his last visit. As he fixes omelettes he can’t get Janet out of his mind, her nervous chatter,
her bloody blinking – the sensation she gives that she is wobbling on the edge of a precipice that cannot be seen. He remembers her grip on his arm and the smell of her as she came to give him a kiss – something dry and dusty, like clay.

‘Where are we sleeping?’ Kale asks when they have cleared up.

‘In the spare room. I’ll have to make the bed up.’

‘We’re sharing, are we?’

‘Not if you don’t want to.’

She shrugs. ‘Not your mother’s room?’

‘No.’

‘I thought that was your bag.’ She’s good at that little smile. It’s a disturbingly alluring expression, carrying with it both detachment and desire.

‘You’re my bag,’ he tells her.

Her smile stays there, but metamorphoses into something else, something softer and less cynical. Perhaps, he thinks, he is starting to tiptoe through the defences that she has erected around the soft, vulnerable core of her; perhaps she is letting him in.

Floorboards creak as they climb the stairs again, like the footsteps of his mother watching their every move. But the spare bedroom has no relics, no other presence – just a room with a double bed and a chest of drawers. Gilda and he used it, but their exertions there have left no impression. It is filled with Kale’s presence now, a spare figure undressing without shyness, letting him watch her, coming to him with a sudden startling tenderness. She folds herself against him. ‘You’re all right,’ she whispers. There is the smell of mint on her breath, and the already familiar taste of her skin. Her breasts are soft and loose, older than the rest of her, sucked.

‘So are you.’

Her voice breathes in his ear. ‘Are you nervous?’

‘Very,’ he replies.

‘You weren’t before.’

‘Now’s different.’

‘How different?’

‘Then I thought I might be able to survive you. Now I’m afraid that I won’t.’

The Denhams gave a party. The problem had not been whom to invite, but whom to exclude. Guests crowded into the house on 16th of June Street and filled much of the garden. Their cars lined the road outside. The Powells came all the way from Nicosia, Jennifer exclaiming how charming it all was down here in the Deep South; Binty and Douglas were there, along with Betty and Johnny Frindle and others from Akrotiri and Episkopi. Even Nissing came, with his slightly surprised expression and his awkward heartiness; and Marjorie, who seemed to find Nissing so attractive that she spent much of the evening with him.

It was Edward who had suggested they invite Damien: ‘That polo-playing fellow, what about him?’ he asked when they were making up the guest list. ‘A good chap, I thought. Interested in sailing. Is his wife over here?’

‘I don’t know.’ She made a counterfeit hesitation. ‘I don’t
think so. Anyway, I’ll put him down and maybe ring and ask. I think I’ve got a phone number somewhere.’

And now she was standing in the garden awaiting Damien’s arrival with apprehension. She told herself this was foolish, because she knew that she had nothing to fear and nothing to expect. He was an acquaintance; someone who had occupied a particular moment in her recent life and now was abstracted from it. But she understood something else: that while there may be a natural and often predictable progression from acquaintance to friendship, you may pass from acquaintance to intimacy in a single, perilous step.

He arrived late, when the party was in full swing. It was Jennifer who spotted him first. ‘It’s that lovely Major Bordello!’ she cried and, taking charge, paraded him round the garden to meet people. Damien seemed startled at such celebrity. He smiled awkwardly and shook hands and exchanged names and views on the political situation and the weather and how to fight EOKA, and when he finally managed to reach Dee he had the manner of a drowning man who has reached the shore just in time. He kissed her on each cheek. ‘It’s lovely to see you again.’

Was it? Was ‘lovely’ the right word? Disturbing, perhaps; discomfiting, disquieting, a whole thesaurus of unease. They were away from the noise of the party, over by one of the palm trees. Did it look as though they were trying to escape notice?

‘Jennifer Powell’s rather a handful, isn’t she?’

‘Jennifer? She means well.’

He smiled. ‘As far as I recall she means “elfin porn jewel”. Isn’t that right? She was delighted with the elfin bit, however inaccurate. She didn’t mind porn jewel either.’

Dee laughed, the kind of laugh that threatens to run out of control, the type that is evoked as much by excitement and suppressed
fear as by anything particularly funny. ‘How on earth did you remember that?’

‘I never forget a good anagram.’ He paused, smiled at her,
into
her, into her eyes, remembering what he had said to her on the promenade deck of the
Empire Bude
in the hot, Mediterranean evening, and knowing that she remembered. ‘And you – are you still the hidden dreamer?’

She slipped out of that as though evading his grasp. ‘What about “Bill Powell”? Do you remember him?’

He glanced across at the ponderous figure of Jennifer’s husband and thought for a moment. ‘Low ill pleb,’ he said triumphantly. ‘Bill Powell: low, ill pleb. Except that he wasn’t ill, really. That was you.’

‘Seasick,’ she corrected him. ‘Not ill.’

‘Whatever you call it, it took three days away from us.’

There was a sudden silence between them, filled by the word ‘us’. She put her hand on his arm. ‘Damien,’ she said. Just that, just his name. No warning, no admonishment, no particular emphasis. Just his name.

‘Can we meet?’ he asked. ‘Please.’

‘We
are
meeting. Here. Now.’

‘I don’t mean that. I want to see you alone. I want to talk.’

‘You
are
talking to me.’

‘I haven’t stopped thinking of you, d’you realize that? Ever since the bloody boat.’

Like a bomb going off, laughter erupted from the table where the drinks were. Were they being laughed at? She looked up anxiously, but it was just Geoffrey making a joke.

‘I know.’

‘And you?’

‘And me,’ she said quietly, and regretted the words as soon as they were spoken, because they could never be unsaid. Denied, yes, but never expunged from memory. She moved her hand to
his elbow, to steer him back towards the crowd. ‘Come on, we can’t stay alone like this—’

‘Yes we can. People talk to each other at parties.’ There was a hint of anger in his tone, an edge of desperation.

‘Come and meet Edward again. He took to you, you know that? He said you wanted to get some sailing.’

She led him over and got the two of them in conversation, then moved away among her guests. She felt strangely detached from the talk and the movement and the laughter. She could only watch from outside, see the gathering for the ugly thing it was, a strange, amoeboid organism, swelling, dividing, contracting, sliding from focus to focus – from drink to food to music – giving voice to its desires and its discomforts. On the terrace some couples began to dance to music from a gramophone. She wandered past them, smiling at people, exchanging a word with one group, laughing at a joke here, listening to part of an argument there, distracted all the while by the presence of the man who was talking with her husband and who glanced over the heads every now and again to catch her eye.

What might happen? She toyed with ideas and possibilities, some of them credible and dull, others improbable and frightening. There was a part of her – a romantic, emotional part – that believed that there was a unitary thing called love, and that you might fall victim to it, and it would overcome willpower. One of her secrets was that she had never experienced this force with Edward; another was that, as an eighteen-year-old girl, she
had
experienced it with Charteris. And now she feared that this emotion lay in wait just ahead, and might ambush her at any moment, bringing with it fear and destruction. The party went on and people came and went, and there grew inside her this deep, invisible core of fear. The presence of all these guests around her, their noise and their laughter, their watching eyes, suddenly terrified her. Never before had she lived her life so
publicly; never had she had so many acquaintances, and so few friends.

M
arjorie’s canteen was housed in two old storerooms down by the harbour. There was about it the smell of the things that had once lain there – rope and sailcloth and stuff like that. Marjorie dominated the place from the far end, where there was a counter and a large brass and steel tea urn. There was usually a couple of squaddies from the castle garrison, sitting at the Formica-topped tables, drinking tea and playing cards. They were National Servicemen, here by compulsion rather than choice. ‘This is what they want, poor dears,’ Marjorie would say: ‘Home from home.’ The canteen was saving up to get a dartboard. They already had chess and draughts and shove-ha’penny, and a small library with ragged paperbacks and copies of
Titbits
and
Lilliput
.

Dee helped out twice a week, making flapjacks and scones – recipes she had from her mother – and serving the soldiers, just like a waitress at the ABC. She would call the taxi to drive her down early in the morning and pick her up at midday to take her back. She could have taken the bus, of course, but that would have been difficult and embarrassing, crowded in among all those Greek women going in to market, the object of stares and comments in a language that she didn’t understand. It was an obvious solution to call for Nicos and his flashy, battered Opel Kapitan. Sometimes he’d come into the canteen for a cup of tea, and have a chat with any soldiers who had fetched up there. They found him strange, with his knowledge of Greek and his undeniable London accent. Nick, they called him, or Nick the Greek. If the place wasn’t too busy, Dee would sit with
him and get him to teach her useful phrases, greetings and questions, words she could use in the shops or with the maid.

‘Worked at Belling’s for a while, din’ I?’ he told her when she asked about his life in London. ‘Assembling water heaters and cookers and the like. But it’s a dead-end thing, working on a bloody production line all the time, ’scuse my language. And anyway, they were laying people off …’

‘You lost the job?’

‘More or less. There was a foreman, had it in for me. I reckon he did it.’

‘And your uncle offered you a job here in Cyprus?’

‘Needed another driver, see.’

‘And how does it compare?’

He shrugged. ‘I wanted to go to America. That’s where the future is, in’t it?’

‘Is it?’

‘Course it is.’ He snapped his fingers. ‘You can get a job easy as that in America. And earn good money, too. I got a cousin in the States – mill worker, something like that. He’s got a Cadillac, swimming pool, the lot.’

‘And he’s only a mill worker?’

‘No. That’s the
name
of the place. Mill Worker.’

‘Maybe that’s Milwaukee.’

‘Yeah, that’s right. Milwaukee. Weird name, in’t it? Indian, they reckon.’

She laughed, and he laughed with her. Something about him reminded her of Charteris, something in his look, in the cast of his face, the way he looked up and smiled at her, the manner in which he laughed.

‘I reckon they want to find me a wife,’ he said. ‘You know what Greek families are like. Trouble is …’

‘What’s the trouble?’

‘All the girls here have got moustaches.’

She laughed at the joke, loudly enough for Marjorie to look up from behind the counter. ‘And then there was this business here in Cyprus.’ He lowered his voice. ‘You know what I mean …’

‘No, what do you mean?’

‘The political thing.’

‘Union with Greece? Enosis?’

He shrugged, flipped his hair back. ‘We’re Greek, aren’t we? Why not?’

The door opened. Nicos glanced round as half a dozen soldiers came into the canteen, laughing and joking about something. Dee recognized the shoulder flashes of Damien’s regiment. One of them had the chevrons of a corporal on his arm. ‘I’d better leave you to your work,’ Nicos said, pushing his chair back. ‘Oh, there’s this.’ He tossed something on to the table, a small card. She turned it over. It was a snapshot of him and her, standing in front of the Opel Kapitan. ‘Souvenir,’ he said as she slipped it into the pocket of her apron. ‘See you later.’